10 Steps to Effectively Disinfect Your Airplane Seat

When it comes to air travel, there’s not much that’s truly under your control as a passenger. You can’t control whether you’re seated next to an armrest hog or if there’s a completely out-of-pocket child kicking your seat from behind any more than you can prevent your flight from getting delayed for some bizarre reason. But one thing you absolutely can control is how clean your seat is.

And those seats can get pretty gnarly, as evidenced by the many air travelers who have shared their dirty seat wipe pics on Reddit. Venting their frustrations in a post on r/AlaskaAirlines, one user lamented, “Just wiped down my headrest and seat back of my chair… I don’t think this plane has been cleaned since it was built. So happy this is what I paid several hundred dollars to sit on!!”

But if the pandemic taught the world anything about sanitation, it’s that taking a few moments to wipe everything down is a low-effort, high-reward venture. Because no one wants to touch sticky mystery substances on their way to catch a dream cruise, we combed the internet for frequent fliers’ best advice on seat cleaning. You don’t necessarily have to complete every item on this list, but it certainly can’t hurt — and you may just be performing a public service for the next few passengers to inherit your seat.

If you’ve ever been told your flight delay is due to the plane getting cleaned, you might be operating under the mistaken belief that cleaning your own airline seat is unnecessary or even redundant. Theoretically, it should be the flight attendants’ job to wipe everything down between flights. In fact, you may have even seen this happen if you’ve lingered a little too long after disembarkation.

But not all airlines perform a thorough seat cleaning between flights, and some operate more under a movie theater-style principle of making sure everything looks acceptable but saving the deep cleaning for later on. While the major trash tends to get swept up, you may not be able to count on any serious efforts to sanitize a plane’s seating.

According to The Wall Street Journal, there is no official regulatory body charged with ensuring airline seats are cleaned in a timely manner. That means it’s up to individual airlines to decide what their cleaning policies are, and some airlines only opt to deep-clean their airline seats every few weeks or even months. The best way to find out is simply to contact the airport directly and get the inside scoop. 

While it might seem just a little bit extra, many serial seat cleaners would never even consider breaking out the seat wipes without a solid pair of disposable plastic gloves. Don’t worry about standing out for it — in the post-COVID era, bringing gloves along to clean your seat has become increasingly common. And when you’ve seen how dirty those seat wipes can get after a cleaning, there’s a good chance you will agree. After all, if you’re cleaning the area around your seat while your flight is taking off, you don’t want to end up with dirty hands when the fasten seat belt light is on and then have to wait in line behind everyone else who didn’t use the restroom before takeoff just to wash them.

But dirty hands are not the only good reason to travel with disposable gloves. Depending on the type of cleaning wipe you go with, there’s a good chance the chemicals inside of them are going to irritate your skin. And as any airline seat cleaning expert knows, the very best disinfectant wipes are the ones that do. Take it from the Reddit user who advised, “I use the peroxide cleaning wipes. If I don’t have gloves my fingers peel.”

Like your disinfecting wipes, you can pick up a pair of cleaning gloves at your nearest discount store. Stores like Dollar Tree offer packs of 100 of your basic cheapo gloves for just over a buck, but they tend to rip if you’re too hard on them. For best results, try picking up the kind of nitrile gloves you can get at a doctor’s office or even investing in reusable latex.

With airline ticket prices constantly on the rise, the last thing you want to do is accidentally cause any damage that could add to the airline’s ever-growing list of reasons to jack up their rates. In your overzealousness to strip all of the germs from your seat, be very careful not to wipe down any leather components.

While this might seem like something of a no-brainer, passengers started using heavy-duty cleaning wipes to clean everything they could after the pandemic. This ruined the leather seats on some planes. To compound the problem, wipes used on leather seats can end up looking awfully dirty as they pull away the leather stain. Some passengers do not realize they’re actually ruining the seats and take the dirty wipes as a positive sign and start scrubbing even harder. Amid the pandemic, Alaska Airlines installed Clorox wipes across 90 airports. On their announcement page for the wipes, the airline warned, “The use of commercially available cleaning wipes on our leather seats can deteriorate the top coat of the leather. The cloth might look dirty afterward, but it’s actually the leather dye color that’s coming off.”

The best way to navigate leather seats is to let the flight attendant know if they’re dirty. If you absolutely must wipe them down, do so with a dry napkin. When in doubt, it’s best to play it safe and assume you’re dealing with leather.

Even if you’ve spent your entire lifetime’s worth of air travel just blindly trusting the contents of your airline seat pocket, this is your sign that you’ve been playing a dangerous game and winning. After spending any amount of time on a Reddit airline seat cleaning thread, you’ll never again want to stick your hands — or anything you like, for that matter — into those disgusting airline seat pockets without taking a good and thorough look at what’s inside of them first. And you’ll want to use your gloves for this job. If there’s something horrifying you don’t want to accidentally end up touching, you can bet there’s an airline passenger somewhere who doesn’t think twice about sticking it in their seat pockets.

For starters, there seems to be an epidemic of passengers just casually clipping their toenails and fingernails and then depositing them inside the travel pocket. “Multiple trips now I’ve watched someone put their foot up on the table tray and trim their toenails,” one Reddit user wrote, adding that they’d been horrified to learn where the nail trimmings end up. Another passenger reported finding chewed gum inside of them on multiple occasions, while another still reported a book cover ruined book cover from seat pocket gum. And that’s not even the worst of it. A former flight attendant recalled watching a passenger stash his laptop in his seat pocket only to scream when he pulled it out covered in the contents of one poorly placed baby diaper.

Because there’s really no way to disinfect an entire seat pocket, the best thing to do is check for trash if you plan to use it. Better yet, consider just avoiding your seat pouch altogether.

Thoroughly sanitizing your tray table should be a top priority on your airplane seat cleaning journey. After all, just about every passenger uses them, and they’re generally using them to eat and/or drink. It’s not unusual to find crumbs lurking over from the last person who rode in your seat. As one Redditor reported, “I started wiping my tables in December 2019 after a tray table full of crumbs that was kinda gross (not with Delta, but still had a few crumbs on previous Delta flights).”

And that’s not even the worst thing that ends up on a tray table. While we’ve already established that some passengers are probably using these as a toenail stopover point on the way to their seat pouch destinations, far too many passengers actually set their children’s dirty diapers directly on them. “The amount of parents i’ve seen changing their child’s diaper on the tray table is depressing,” one former flight attendant reported on r/TravelHacks.

To get everything good and clean, start by wiping the visible part of the tray table down while it’s still put away. When you’ve hit all of the nooks and crannies, go ahead and flip it down to get the other side.

After you’ve wiped down your entire tray table top to bottom, it’s time to hit every inch of the armrest. If you’re lucky enough to have the aisle seat, arguably the best choice on a plane, you can go crazy cleaning your armrest. If you’re sharing your armrest with a neighbor, there’s a fair chance they won’t mind your taking a moment to wipe the whole thing down.

But this step is even more important if you’re sitting in the window seat. That’s because despite all sense of basic human propriety, rude passengers — typically the ones with absolutely filthy shoes — like to use the window armrest in front of them to prop up their feet. “I’ve moved feet that stuck through the space between the bulkhead and my window,” one Reddit user complained.

And even if your armrests don’t end up covered in dirt from someone’s worn-out Nikes, it’s worth your time to wipe them down before settling in. Especially with all of those dirty diapers and fingernail clippings hanging around.

The one thing that every single passenger who sat in your seat touched is the seat belt. And while it’s lovely to imagine all of those folks have touched their respective seat belts with clean hands, we all know deep in our heart of hearts that there are some truly funky people out there flying the friendly skies.

But dirty hands aren’t the worst thing you need to worry about getting all over your seat belt. The grim reality is that some folks do tend to get motion sickness when they fly, especially when there is turbulence afoot. And unfortunately, that also means they sometimes lose their lunch all over the place, including all over your seat belt.

Reports of seat belt vomit are another discouragingly common complaint on Reddit, and one r/Delta passenger reported the time they found it all over both their and their husband’s seat belts. While the airline was able to switch out their seat belts, there’s really no way to be sure your safety belt doesn’t have a questionable vomit provenance short of wiping it down.

When you’ve finished wiping down your tray table, elbow rests, and seat belt, take a quick look around for anything else you could end up touching while you fly. One flight attendant recommends wiping down just about everything within your field of vision. “[D]efinitely wipe down your tray table, as well as the air vent, armrest, video monitor, seatbelt buckle, window shade handle, anything that’s a direct touch point,” they advised on r/TravelHacks. Other flight attendants chimed in to remind passengers that there isn’t always time to get all of these small details clean between flights, noting that the cleanup tends to be quick and dirty (pun intended). Call buttons, window borders — if you’re planning to touch it, clean it.

While this might feel like a lot of effort for a short flight, if you’re flying cross-country or internationally, you’ll be glad you took the time to ensure your space is completely free of germs and miscellaneous biofilms.

In an interview with AFAR, Dr. Joshua Rosenberg emphasized the effectiveness of antibacterial wipes for attacking germs on these surfaces, advising, “The use of an antiseptic wipe that kills viruses and bacteria on the high-touch surfaces of the plane might be helpful.”

The bathrooms on airplanes can end up in rough shape as the flight goes on, but that isn’t what you really need let worry you. Even if they appear clean, the lavatory door handles are frequently covered in invisible germs and should be treated accordingly. Because the galleys flight attendants work out of are located right next to the toilets, one flight attendant reported hearing flushes all through the flight without any handwashing to follow. “[A]ssume every touch point is ridden with fecal germs,” they warned on Reddit. As a good rule of thumb, they recommended treating every potential touchpoint in the restroom as if it were radioactive.

While using just the bathroom’s soap and water to wipe down these surfaces might be tempting, you should rely on your sanitizer wipes to avoid the unexpected disgusting airline health risks experts have found lurking in some airlines’ water supplies.

To avoid touching anything you don’t want to on your way to and from the lavatory, grab a wipe or tissue and use it to open the door. Wipe down the flush button and handles while you’re in there, or at the very least, touch them with a tissue instead of your bare fingers.