Man comes up with witty hack to make co-passenger move away their smelly feet on flight

Editor's note: This article was originally published on August 31, 2023. It has since been updated.

2023 has seen a lot of fussy passengers and co-passengers coming up with unique ideas to make flying a bit more convenient for them and inconvenient for others mid-flight. After all, what's traveling without a little adventure? But the recent example that has left social media users in splits shows how a man gave his co-passenger a taste of their own medicine. While traveling in an aircraft, the seats are of the same size but as people have different physiques, some find it difficult to adjust more. Not having enough leg space is a reasonable complaint. However, that does not mean that you put yourself in places you don't belong. If some people don't have an aisle seat to stretch their legs, they try to extend their legs underneath the seat in front and make the passengers in the row in front miserable. But Andrea (@andreasellingseen), found the perfect fix to this and handled the troublesome situation like a pro. 

He shared a six-second video that first shows how the co-passenger sitting behind put their feet forward, taking up space. The man films himself looking down at the feet and then switches the camera to show how he started pouring a little bit of water on the feet. Immediately the passenger behind felt uncomfortable and removed their feet from their space. The clip was viewed almost nine million times and the caption, when loosely translated to English, read: "Have a nice trip!" People in the comments section loved how Andrea got the space he was entitled to on the flight without creating a scene. "Letting the intrusive thoughts win," commented @Kate. "That is the correct action to take," added @jbt_Harry.

In another similar incident, a man named @danielgreen2426 recorded a video of himself exacting revenge after discovering the person's foot directly beneath him. A sneaker and a bag of sweets can be seen under Daniel's seat, where the passenger's foot can be seen wiggling. "Woman on the plane behind me kept putting her smelly feet under me," Daniel says in the video. Daniel puts a can of soda straight on her toe as the woman continues to move her foot for a few seconds. But that didn't stop the unpleasant passenger from putting her foot under the seat. Daniel goes back in for another pour, but "she then stopped," he says. When the passenger detects something damp on her foot, she moves it around and eventually moves it from beneath the seat.

To use the hack that Andrea opted for, one needs to have a bottle of water. In a flight where water costs $3, one passenger devised a smart way to relieve one's thirst for free. Recently, TikTok user @rachealxk released a video of how she discovered a technique to get drinking water on a Ryanair flight without paying for it. The passenger is shown in the video carrying a plastic cup with two giant ice cubes and sipping the trickle of water that accumulates at the bottom of the cup as the ice slowly melts. "I was thirsty, but I didn't want to pay $3.23 for water," the text overlay explains. The creator added in the caption: "No cause why does water have to be so expensive," with a crying emoji and many agreed with her in the comments section.