The Best Travel Hacks & Flying Tips From Flight Attendants

Flying can be hard. Unless you're one of those fancy first class travelers (and, um, if you are, can we hang with you?), it pretty much looks like schlepping your massively overpacked suitcase to your sad little gate, paying $20 for an aggressively mediocre sandwich, and then squeezing your adult-sized body into a toddler-sized seat right in between Snoring Guy and Wants To Passive Aggressively Battle Over Elbow Room Person. (Seriously, why do we always end up with the dang middle seat?) Oh, and there's also that super fun part at the beginning where you get to take your shoes off and risk having those pricey beauty products you splurged on confiscated by TSA.

Anyway, to be fair, we know we have a bad attitude about it all (we're not hiding it very well either, are we?), and there are probably things we could be doing to make the whole experience less stressful. But what, exactly, are those things? We polled flight attendants — aka the masters of smooth, angst-free traveling — to find out.