This Viral TikTok Travel Hack Involves a Hotel Safe and a...Shoe?

Travel TikTok is a strange and wonderful place. It’s also becoming a dumping site for some pretty outlandish “hacks.” Case in point: the uptick in able-bodied passengers requesting wheelchairs in airports last summer in an effort to bypass the mayhem, at the guidance of one particularly malevolent user.

But that’s not to say that all the hacks are meritless. In fact, there are many industry professionals — flight attendants chief among them — offering some pretty sound advice. It’s thanks to TikTok’s resident flight attendant, Kat Kamalani, that I know how to raise the aisle seat armrest. (However, she also at one point suggested that passengers use the tissue in the lavatories in lieu of the toilet paper, which she claimed “disintegrates in two seconds,” so even she isn’t batting a thousand).

That said, as originally reported by Travel + Leisure, a KLM flight attendant by the name of Esther has taken to the platform to share some new-to-me travel hacks that I might at some point actually put to good use — the first of which involves using a hanger to clip hotel curtains closed to achieve total darkness. Genius!

For Esther’s second tip, she suggests plugging a USB into the back of the hotel TV to charge your phone in the absence of a universal power adapter. The others include using the complimentary shower cap found in most hotel rooms to cover dirty shoes before stowing them in your bag (and as a cover for notoriously grimy hotel remotes), as well as substituting other cards for room keys in order to keep the electricity on while you’re not in your room.

A Flight Attendant Went Viral for Sharing Controversial In-Flight “Hacks”

Did you want to clog a toilet? Cause that’s how you clog a toilet.

One of the last — and, in this travel writer’s humble opinion, more interesting — tips is to keep a shoe in the hotel safe. The reason? You might forget your passport in the safe but you’re less likely to forget your left shoe.

“Worried about forgetting something from your locker? Put your heel/shoe in it so you won’t forget it!” Esther wrote.

Of course, naysayers may argue the efficacy of this tip, but unless you’ve almost checked out of your room while your wallet, AirPods and passport sat in the safe as I have (likely on more than one occasion), your argument is no good here.