Push Comes To Shove: Passengers And Travel Workers Call Rudeness A Real Problem

Stressful travel conditions, a general decline in values, and parents who don’t control their children are sore spots for Americans on the moveaccording to an informal canvass of travel industry workers conducted by the nonpartisan opinion organization Public Agenda, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, and a survey of passengers conducted by the online travel site Travelocity together suggest that .

Of those responding to the Public Agenda and Travelocity feedback polls,

— 65 percent of passengers say rudeness is a serious problem in travel these days, and 52 percent of travelers say rudeness is a major cause of stress. 54 percent of travel employees say passenger rudeness is a top cause of their on-the-job stress and tension.

— Nearly half (49 percent) of travel workers say they have personally seen a situation where disrespectful behavior threatened to escalate into physical confrontation. And an additional 19 percent say disrespect had led to a situation actually getting physical.

— 62 percent of travel personnel say they sometimes or often see their fellow workers being rude, and another 50 percent admit that they have lost patience and been impolite to passengers themselves. But when this happens, 56 percent say it is typically because employees were provoked and treated badly by passengers. While most passengers give travel personnel high marks for overall courtesy, 67 percent say that when they have a run-in with rude travel employees, they are likely to be rude in return.

The Public Agenda Feedback Poll of travel industry workers represents the views of 875 travel workers who decided to answer the survey and cannot be assumed to represent the views of the general population of people who work in the travel industry. The Travelocity poll represents the responses of 1,009 Travelocity members who have traveled in the last 12 months.