Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts

Get Simon Calder’s Travel email

A common travel hack is to take an empty water bottle and then fill it up after passing through security, but one woman has issued a warning if the water bottle happens to come with a straw.

Kat Darby recently took to TikTok to explain what happened after she brought a reusable water bottle on a plane herself. “Never fly on a plane with a water bottle with a straw in it,” she captioned her video.

“Have you ever gone on a plane and brought a water bottle with a straw in it?” Darby began. “Well, do I have a story for you because last week, I went on a flight, and I brought this handy dandy water bottle with me, and it has a straw in it.”

She mentioned that one of her favourite perks of the built-in straw was that she didn’t have to tip the bottle to drink from it, but the straw was her downfall when she attempted to take a sip while in the air on a plane.

“What I did not account for was water pressure,” she said. “So, when I opened it, it proceeded to piss like a hose … I hit … like 15 people with my squirting water bottle because, lucky for me, this thing holds like 30 ounces. I could not get it to stop.”

Darby continued to reveal that the only way she could stop the strong pressure was to seal the opening of the straw with her finger and then press the lid which then resulted in water spraying her in the face.

“So learn from my mistakes: Never fly with a giant water bottle with a f***ing straw in it,” she concluded.

After posting, her video went on to receive almost one million views, with many people leaving comments mentioning that they did the exact same thing while on flights of their own.

“This happened to me on a red eye,” one person wrote in the comments. “I had JUST gotten to sleep when I essentially got waterboarded by the water bottle of the kid next to me.”

“I did this…. It was the fountain that never ended! That really should be on the flight attendant puppet show before the flight,” one said.

“Same thing happened to me. It was like a geyser. Everyone around me was soaked. So embarrassing but hilarious,” a second added.

“I bit into a camelback rubber straw on a plane and accidentally waterboarded myself,” a third recalled.

Others pointed out that you have to equalise the pressure before drinking from a water bottle on a plane.

“I always untwist the cap to release the pressure before I open the straw,” a viewer explained.

This isn’t the only travel hack to receive mixed responses. One woman, named Lexi, also recently took to TikTok to share a hack that she learned on the platform, but some fellow travellers are questioning if it’s safe to use or not.

The hack shows the woman sitting in her plane seat with her shoes off and feet up on the seat, with the seatbelt wrapped around her ankles. “To whoever it was that said to put the plane belt around your ankles…I owe you my life!!!!” text across the screen read, indicating that she loved the hack.

After the video was posted, it went on to receive over 20 million views, with many people leaving comments to question about exactly how safe the hack was.

“My knees would be like grenades when I unbuckled it,” scoffed one commenter, while another wrote: “No way that’s safe.”

Read More