A Field Guide to the Most Insufferable Summer Vacationers

They’re at every airport, resort, and maybe even in your own travel party. Here’s how to deal with them and avoid becoming one

an illustration of a person reclining in an airplane seat and squishing a fellow passenger

Welcome to summer travel, where everyone packs entitlement in their carry-on.

Madeline McMahon

Eric Spitznagel,

AARP

Published April 30, 2026

There’s a version of summer vacation that exists only in memory and stock photography. The beach is uncluttered, the breakfast is unhurried and the sunset belongs to nobody’s social feed. The reality, of course, often involves a guy with a Bluetooth speaker the size of a microwave and strong opinions about beach vibes at 10 in the morning.

A 2025 survey by Radical Storage, a luggage storage company that tracks global travel trends, found that more than half of American tourists admit to acting out of character while traveling, a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “tourist syndrome.” Younger generations are the worst offenders, with 56.1 percent of millennials admitting to the behavior, but older travelers shouldn’t feel too smug. Nearly half of Gen Xers (48.6 percent) and boomers (49.1 percent) confess that travel tends to bring out their worst instincts as well.

What turns otherwise reasonable people into resort menaces? It usually comes down to what they spent to get there. “When a purchase feels important, like a vacation, people naturally invest more time, money and emotional energy into it,” says Dr. Sandy Chen, a consumer behavior and hospitality researcher at Ohio University. “Psychologically, that can create a sense of entitlement or urgency: ‘I paid for this, so it should happen exactly how and when I want.’” The problem, she notes, is that everyone around you paid, too.

What follows is a field guide to the most reliably maddening summer travelers, and how to survive them without becoming one yourself.

an illustration of an angry passenger at an airline counter

Check-in wasn’t until 4 p.m., but his indignation was ready at sunrise.

Madeline McMahon

The Airport Gate Lurker

Flight attendants have a name for this person: gate lice. It’s not flattering, but it is accurate. The Gate Lurker stands inches from the stanchions a full 25 minutes before their zone is called, with the focused intensity of someone who believes proximity will somehow accelerate the process. The Lurker is not trying to ruin your boarding experience; they’re simply operating under the sincere belief that standing closer to a door makes the plane leave sooner, which is not how planes work but is apparently how anxiety does. They won’t board sooner. The plane will not leave sooner. But here they stand, a barnacle with a passport, making it physically difficult for anyone whose zone has actually been called. “Every ingredient that’s necessary to bring out the worst in people can be found in airports,” says Nick Leighton, co-host of the etiquette podcast Were You Raised by Wolves? “Stress, fatigue, crowds, a loss of control, and the fact that you’ll never see these people again. That anonymity makes people feel like their behavior will have no consequences.”

How to manage: A polite “excuse me, I think that’s my zone” is usually enough to open a path.

How to avoid becoming one: Your boarding zone will be called. The plane won’t leave with you still in line. The seat you paid for will not be reassigned because you weren’t paying attention when they announced Group 3. Sit down. When they call your group, stand up.

The Carry-On Gambler

Has studied the airline’s posted bag dimensions and decided they are more of a philosophical suggestion than a binding rule. They approach the overhead bin with the confidence of someone attempting a magic trick at a wedding, rotating and re-angling a suitcase the size of a college dorm refrigerator, certain that the next position will work. It will not work. It was never going to work. When the flight attendant finally intervenes, they accept this outcome with the wounded expression of someone who has been personally failed by physics.

How to manage: There’s not much to do here except wait. The flight attendant will handle it, and they’ve handled it 400 times before. Find comfort in that. As Leighton puts it, “The formal rules are not fuzzy. The issue is just people thinking that they’re exempt from the rules.”

How to avoid becoming one: Before your trip, look up your airline’s carry-on size limit on their website and measure your bag against it. Every major carrier publishes the maximum dimensions, and the math is unambiguous. If your bag exceeds them at home, it will exceed them at the gate, and you’ll have to check it.

The Armrest Imperialist

Within seconds of sitting down, they’ve claimed both armrests with the calm authority of someone who’s never considered that the stranger next to them also has elbows. There’s no aggression in it, which is almost the most aggravating part.

How to manage: A light, wordless elbow presence, gradually and calmly asserted, is usually enough to establish that the armrest is a shared resource. If they don’t budge, a friendly “do you mind if we split this?” tends to work better than suffering in silence for four hours.

How to avoid becoming one: Window and aisle seats typically have armrests on the outer edges. The middle-seat passenger, who has already drawn the short straw, should get first claim on both center armrests. That’s just decency.

Leighton’s test is asking: “Are my preferences imposing on yours?” In a row of three economy seats, the answer is usually yes.

The Aggressive Recliner

The wheels leave the tarmac, the plane angles upward, and this person slams their seat back with the speed and moral certainty of a guillotine. There’s no glance behind them, no warning, and no regard for the laptop, tray table, knees, beverage or general dignity of the human behind them.

How to manage: If someone has already reclined into your lap without warning, a light tap on the shoulder and a polite “would you mind bringing that up just a bit?” works more often than you’d expect. If they decline, you are now in a conflict you didn’t start and cannot win, so accept your fate, recline into the person behind you, and let the whole thing cascade backward through the cabin in a slow, depressing domino effect.

How to avoid becoming one: Before reclining, glance behind you. If someone has a tray table down, a laptop open, or knees already compressing into the seat, a quiet “do you mind if I recline a little?” costs nothing and occasionally produces goodwill.

The Hotel Check-In Demander

Check-in is at 4 p.m. They arrive at 9 a.m. When they learn they can’t get into their room for seven hours, they act as though the hotel has personally betrayed them. They drift back to the front desk every 45 minutes with escalating disbelief. “Still nothing?” “Nothing yet?” “What about now?” By 2 p.m., this person has somehow made the passage of time feel aggressive.

Room turnover is a logistical process involving housekeeping schedules, guest departures, and inspections. No amount of front-desk visits will change that.

Chen explains what’s happening psychologically. “Guests often arrive with high expectations and a mental picture of how everything should go. When the gap between expectation and reality isn’t understood, frustration builds.”

How to manage: There is no shortcut here. You wait, the staff waits, and eventually the Demander arrives at the same conclusion the hotel tried to offer them four hours ago. You can always try the kind request — emphasis on request and not demand.

How to avoid becoming one: Calling early the day of to request an earlier check-in often works. If not, most hotels will store your luggage at check-in and text you when your room is ready. Use that system. Go find lunch. Be a person.

The Resort Reviewer

Not on vacation so much as undercover on behalf of the Department of Complaints. They photograph the ice machine, narrate every inconvenience at a volume calculated to reach management, and deploy phrases like “for the price point” before most people have had coffee. The pool is cold. The muffins are dry. By the time of checkout, they’ve filed a review so thorough it could be submitted as evidence in a civil proceeding.

A hypercritical mindset “can reduce enjoyment in real time,” Chen says. “It shifts attention away from the experience itself and toward judgment, which often makes people feel less satisfied even when the service is objectively good.”

How to manage: Noise-canceling headphones work at the pool just as well as on a plane.

How to avoid becoming one: The Resort Reviewer’s core mistake is treating a vacation as a performance review rather than an experience. A better strategy, says Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the upcoming book Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species, starts before you even leave home.

“Having really positive expectations makes you enjoy it more,” she says. “You start noticing the things you were looking forward to, whereas if somebody else had made the choices for you, you might not have bothered.”

That anticipatory pleasure, she argues, is one of the most reliable and underused sources of vacation joy, because nothing can go wrong while you’re still just imagining it. Arrive looking for what’s working, and you’ll almost always find it.

an illustration of a hotel guest looking at a pool filled with pool floats

Some people relax by the pool. Others colonize it.

Madeline McMahon

The Pool-Area Squatter

Arrives at the pool at 7 a.m. to drape a towel over a chaise longue with the solemnity of someone planting a flag on newly discovered land, then disappears. By 9 a.m., six additional chairs have been reserved for family members, a paperback, a sandal, or whatever personal artifact is deemed sufficient to hold sovereign territory. The pool deck now looks like a sad estate sale.

“Pools combine a few key factors: limited prime spots, high visibility and unclear social rules,” Chen says. “When norms aren’t clearly defined — who owns a chair, how long it can be left unattended — people fill in the gaps themselves. It’s less about aggression and more about uncertainty plus perceived scarcity.”

How to manage: Many resorts now have official policies limiting chair reservations to 30 minutes or less. Check the rules and politely ask a pool attendant to enforce them. Don’t move the towels yourself unless you enjoy conflict as a hobby.

How to avoid becoming one: The chairs are for people, not intentions. If your family isn’t at the pool, your family doesn’t have a chair at the pool. This is not a complicated system.

The Buffet Line Blocker

Must first perform a reconnaissance mission of every steam tray, fruit bowl, pastry basket and yogurt option, then circle back for a second look in case the waffles have changed political parties since the first pass. Meanwhile, the line has grown hostile, the scrambled eggs are developing a skin and a child near the cereal dispenser is aging into adulthood.

Chen notes that abundance doesn’t always relax people — especially in an all-you-can-eat environment. Buffets “can trigger a kind of subtle scarcity mindset,” where guests rush and compete despite there being plenty for everyone.

How to manage: You cannot hurry someone who is on Lap 2 of a steam tray audit. Get a coffee, find a position that isn’t directly behind them, and accept that breakfast will begin when they’ve made peace with the waffle situation.

How to avoid becoming one: Walk the length of the buffet once, decide what looks good and get in line. The buffet was designed to make this easy, so any difficulty is entirely your fault. The scrambled eggs are not a commitment you’ll regret for the rest of your life.

The Poolside FaceTimer

Has selected a lounge chair as the venue for a speakerphone video call and sees no reason to lower the volume. They rotate the phone between their face and the horizon so that both their relatives and everyone within 30 feet can experience the resort simultaneously. The call will cover the drive to the airport, the flight, the check-in, the pool temperature, and several updates about a family member nobody else knows.

How to manage: You have two choices: ask them politely to take it somewhere else, which works about half the time, or relocate your own chair, which works every time. One of these options involves a conversation with a stranger who has already demonstrated poor judgment. The other involves moving a chair.

How to avoid becoming one: “If I blast music from my phone in public, is that what everyone else is wanting to hear?” Leighton asks, rhetorically. The answer, in every situation and in every country, is no. Take the call somewhere else.

The Social Media Influencer

Has made 12 people wait on a beach path while retaking a sunset selfie because the first 11 versions didn’t look “accidental” enough. The sun is setting, the moment is passing, and the shot requires a very specific angle of forced casual joy that has so far eluded them. Meanwhile, everyone who needs to get past them will simply have to wait.

“If you’re removing yourself from the experience and you’re just there as the photographer, that’s probably not going to be good,” says Dunn. “When it comes to spending time with each other, that’s when the tech needs to go away, because it does undermine our focus on each other.”

How to manage: Walk directly into the frame with cheerful obliviousness. Say “excuse me,” watch them scramble, and enjoy the moment.

How to avoid becoming one: The beach was there before Instagram, and it will outlast it. Take one photo, put the phone away, and be somewhere actually beautiful instead of documenting that you were.

The Hallway Broadcaster

Returns to the hotel at 1:17 a.m., stands outside your door and conducts a full-volume postgame analysis of the evening, as though hotel hallways are acoustically sealed environments. The conversation covers everything: what they ordered, whether Jen was being weird and what the plan is for tomorrow.

“The line between the public and private is very blurry for a lot of people,” Leighton says.

How to manage: A firm knock on the wall, followed by silence on your end, sends a clearer message than any words. They’re not malicious; they’ve simply entered that particular state of vacation euphoria where consequences feel theoretical. If you can still hear them after they get into their rooms, a call to the front desk might help.

How to avoid becoming one: The elevator is the finish line. Whatever volume was appropriate for the bar, the street or the cab ride home does not transfer to a carpeted hallway where strangers are sleeping three inches from your face. Get to your room, close the door and then say everything you need to say about Jen.

The Itinerary Imposer

Before the trip even began, they circulated a color-coded document covering breakfast windows, walking routes, museum reservations and “optional fun” that somehow feels mandatory. There is no drifting. There is no sleeping in. Free time appears once, briefly, like a typo.

Dunn has seen this dynamic in the research. Many travelers aren’t really optimizing happiness so much as activity. They’re “optimizing the wrong variable,” mistaking a packed schedule for a good vacation.

“If it’s taking away your autonomy, and especially if you’ve got precious vacation time, and people are saying you better spend this whole day at art museums when you’re not an art person, that’s going to feel like an imposition,” she says.

The key distinction, she notes, is between organizing logistics for people, which they appreciate, and dictating how they should feel and what they should enjoy, which they resent.

How to manage: The time to discuss this is before the color-coded document has been laminated, not from inside a museum you didn’t want to visit. “I’d love some free time built in” is a reasonable request.

How to avoid becoming one: Build at least one unscheduled block into every day and resist every instinct to fill it.

The Sunscreen Avoider

Spends eight unshaded hours in direct tropical sunlight, acts shocked when their body begins glowing like a brake light, and requires sympathy from everyone within aloe range. The next morning, they make the exact same decision. By Day 3, they are less a person than a cautionary tale. By Day 4, they are a peeling, furious lobster insisting this was always the plan.

How to manage: Offer sunscreen once. If they decline, let them discover the consequences on their own. You are on vacation, not their dermatologist.

How to avoid becoming one: The American Academy of Dermatology recommends sunscreen rated SPF 30 or higher, reapplied every two hours. This guidance is not new, not complicated, and not optional just because you’re on vacation. The sun has been doing this for approximately 4.5 billion years and has not once adjusted its behavior out of consideration for someone’s travel plans.

The Souvenir Maximalist

Enters every gift shop the way hedge funds enter a distressed market — with urgency, no clear exit strategy and a conviction that all of it has value. They’ll pick up magnets, keychains, hot sauce, driftwood art, shell ornaments, novelty aprons, a hat they’ll never wear and a snow globe from a place whose climate has never once suggested snow. By departure day, they are on the airport floor redistributing ceramic turtles between suitcases like someone fleeing a fallen regime.

How to manage: Whatever time they say they’ll be ready, that is not the time they’ll be ready. Add an hour, get yourself a caffeinated beverage and find a comfortable seat.

How to avoid becoming one: Set a souvenir budget before the trip and a physical limit — say, whatever fits in a small tote bag. Buy one thing you’ll actually display. The rest is just future trash with a beach theme.

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