A company known for comfort weighs in on increasingly divisive issue — seat reclining.
Spilled drinks, crunched laptop screens and crushed knees.
A new video shows the reasons why reclining your seat on airplanes morphed from an acceptable practice into a top irritant for many air passengers.
The video is part of an ad campaign launched in late November by the furniture company La-Z-Boy, which includes a petition imploring travelers to "Do the upright thing. Don't recline when you fly."
The petition had more than 186,000 signatures as of Monday, a La-Z-Boy representative told CNBC Travel.
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The tongue-in-cheek campaign by the company, known for its plush oversized reclining chairs, touches on an increasingly hot-button issue, one stoked by growing passenger sizes and dwindling seat pitches.
Unlike drunkenness and hygiene issues — such as clipping fingernails and taking off shoes — which are widely disdained by fellow passengers, opinions on seat reclining mainly fall into two camps: those who say don't do it, and others who argue the recline button exists for a reason. (A third, more nuanced position deems reclining acceptable on long-haul or night flights.)
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La-Z-Boy's campaign places the company firmly in the "never recline" camp, with the petition stating that "just because you can doesn't mean you should."
Another video in the campaign shows how one reclined seat can ripple through the aircraft like falling dominos, eventually ending in the last row of the plane — a row both disliked for lacking the option to recline and lauded for being one of the few spaces in the plane where one can recline with impunity, depending on the aircraft.
A 2023 survey of 18 markets by the research firm YouGov found that attitudes toward seat reclining vary by region, with Europeans being the least tolerant of the practice. Europe is home to the tallest people in the world too.
Fewer than one in three travelers in the United Arab Emirates were bothered by it, however.
Overall, flyers from the UAE were less bothered by every in-flight behavior — including personal grooming and noisy children — save one, according to the survey. Those from the UAE deemed public displays of affection as unacceptable at higher rates than those from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, the survey showed.
