Travel2015

DALLAS: Snoring, slouching sleepers and the challenges of climbing over fellow passengers for a trip to the toilet.

Those are among myriad inflight etiquette issues faced by travellers on crowded planes, and are the first targeted by JetBlue in a planned series of over- the- top videos posted on Facebook and Twitter to encourage passengers to think about their behaviour.

“We wanted to say, ‘We’ve all been there. We get it, and let’s talk about it,’” Lisa Borromeo, JetBlue director of brand management and advertising, said about the clips for #FlightEtiquette. “It’s a universal truth of flying.”

The videos follow a summer in which several incidents of air rage occurred on crowded US aircraft, including three in a span of nine days that led to flight diversions.

One, on a United Airlines plane, involved a passenger spat that escalated into water tossing and transformed the Knee Defender seatback- lodging gadget into a household name.

The JetBlue videos aren’t intended to tell customers how to behave, Borromeo said in an interview. The exaggerated examples “are meant to be fun” and to generate dialog with passengers about their experiences, she said.

JetBlue was an early adopter of social media to directly converse with customers and the videos extend that hallmark. The first, posted in December, is entitled “How Not to Take a Nap.”

It portrays a sleeping, snoring man leaning on to the shoulder and then the lap of a passenger in the seat next to him, and eventually lying across the entire row.

The second, unveiled last week, shows a passenger in a window seat consuming several drinks and then facing the dilemma of getting past sleeping travellers in the middle and aisle seats of her row. In “How Not to Make an Exit,” the fidgeting woman tries various ways to wake the sleepers, then attempts to climb over and under them.

The videos don’t hold universal

PICTURE: AP YOU ARE NOT ALONE: Basic rules apply when heading for a holiday.