The Gen Z travel trends that could ruin your next holiday

Most of these fads are enraging, but I did find one genius hack among them

There’s a new trend you need to know about, and it really could elevate your next holiday. Enter the “airport tray aesthetic”, where you artfully arrange your super-cool travel kit in those boring grey plastic boxes as you go through security, to best reflect your style, (extra points if you colour co-ordinate), and then post the photo to social media. And when I say it could “elevate”, I mean that if you end up stuck behind one of these tray curators, it will move your airport experience up from annoying, in a banal sort of way, to full-blown infuriating.
“In my art director era,” posted one Piper Taich, an American graphic designer, along with a series of her best arrangements on TikTok (if you need some inspiration, think analogue cameras, high-brow novels, expensive shoes and vintage sunglasses). I did a bit of digging, and it transpires that Piper shot hers in her apartment, so we can forgive her any potential airport traffic jams. As for the trend in general? Baffling, but harmless as long you’re not causing delays – though how likely is it that junior devotees will be able to resist having a go next time they’re loping through security?
I’ll tell you what probably isn’t harmless, and that’s another Gen-Z-fueled craze to have done the rounds this summer: the “seatbelt feet hack”. In this trend, airline passengers hug their knees to their chest and fasten their seatbelt around their ankles, supposedly for comfort, and to help them nod off. Dr Richard Dawood, a specialist in travel medicine at the Fleet Street Clinic, is alarmed by the trend, telling us: “This does not look at all safe. With a frontal impact, the likely result would be to catapult the passenger forwards, over the belt and into the back of the seat in front.”
Other social media fads in which travel influencers have been unwittingly auditioning for the Darwin Awards include flocking to photogenic backdrops and either ruining them or themselves. In 2019, Instagrammers were falling ill at the “idyllic” electric blue Monte Neme lake in Spain; not a lake at all, as it turned out, but rather a toxic dump. Otherwise known as the “Galician Chernobyl”, it has proved hazardous to those who have swum in it, with one content creator telling Spanish news outlet Público that she had suffered vomiting and a rash that persisted for weeks after she took a dip.
These are not victimless crimes, if you consider a recent survey from travel agent Opodo, which found that more than a third of global respondents said they would indeed be “influenced” by social media to travel to new destinations. Although you may take comfort in the fact that Britons were the outliers, with only 14 per cent agreeing with that statement.
Another not exactly new but very irritating zeitgeist to have been disrupting holidays this year? Political correctness gone mad. Last month, a passenger was reportedly removed from a Delta Airlines flight for wearing a pro Donald Trump T-shirt. The man was filmed being kicked off the plane in Florida, having failed to comply with a somewhat dystopian order to turn the garment inside out after it prompted a complaint (the arguably tasteless shirt features the former president holding up two middle fingers along with a reference to the recent viral “hawk tuah” meme). According to Delta’s contract of carriage, customers can be evicted from the cabin if their “conduct or attire […] creates an unreasonable risk of offence or annoyance to other passengers.”
And let’s not forget the mask police. “Put your face in airplane mode,” wrote journalist Saahil Desai for The Atlantic after the mandates were phased out following the Covid pandemic. “My time on Delta Airlines 5308, seat 17B, sent my cortisol levels through the roof,” he wrote. “As we sat on the JFK tarmac for a solid two hours, a maskless woman directly in front of me didn’t stop coughing.” Desai later clarified: “I did not end up getting Covid, though perhaps I got lucky.” Several years after the requirement to muzzle oneself on planes ended, this rhetoric persists. I was on a flight last month on which I coughed thrice – because I’d inhaled a crisp, to be clear – and a young N95-clad passenger several rows away snarled at me that I “should be wearing a mask”. 
Let’s end on a positive note though, shall we? I have seen one viral travel hack this summer that I consider to be genius: and that’s the “pillowcase packing” trick. In a bid to circumnavigate extortionate baggage fees, our cash-strapped youth have been filming themselves stuffing empty pillowcases with clothes and taking them through as hand luggage rather than checking in a suitcase. I regularly take a full-sized pillow with me when I’m flying long-haul, and the thought has never occurred to me. As long as you aren’t filling it with electronics, liquids or metal, there’s nothing for the X-ray machines or security agents to get in a flap about. And who is this harming other than perhaps Ryanair’s bottom line? 
More innovation like this please, Gen-Zers, and less of the tray posing, and we’ll all get along just fine.