By: Courtney Chase
Brandon C. Blewett has an unusually candid author biography for a business book. He notes that his permanent residence is simply where he pays property taxes, because he seems to spend much of his life in the sky, on planes, or in airports. That is the biography of a man who has observed a significant amount of human behavior under the specific pressure of modern air travel, and How to Avoid Strangers on Airplanes is the sharp, funny, and thoughtful record of what more than a decade of that observation produced.
The book lands with the confidence of a writer who knows his material and has earned it through lived experience rather than research alone. Blewett’s comic voice has the compact, punchy quality of someone who learned to communicate efficiently during a career in professional services, where time was often scarce, and the ability to make a point quickly and memorably mattered.
Many of his observations about annoying traveler behavior land with enough precision that they feel studied rather than casual. Across the book’s chapters, those observations create the pleasure of reading something that keeps matching the experience of people who have spent enough time in airports to recognize the patterns immediately.
The Six Habits of Highly Annoying Travelers are the heart of the book. Each archetype is drawn with enough specificity that readers can picture the kind of person being described and enough universality that they may recognize the behavior pattern in professional contexts beyond the airport.
The Gate Lice, the overhead bin abusers, and the seat recliners who deploy their chairs the moment the wheels leave the ground without a backward glance all illuminate something familiar about how certain people navigate shared environments at the expense of everyone around them. Blewett makes those observations feel more like entertainment than complaint.
What he builds from those observations is the book’s more substantial contribution: a set of practical insights about professional behavior, organizational navigation, and career development that are grounded in experience and delivered with a light touch. The reflective questions that punctuate the chapters give readers a framework for applying each observation to their own situation, which moves the book from comedy into professional development without losing the humor that makes it readable.
How to Avoid Strangers on Airplanes is the business book someone might recommend to a person who says they do not usually read business books. It is also the kind of book a frequent traveler may return to before a long flight, partly for the entertainment and partly because the professional reminders it contains can hold up on a second reading.
If you want a business book that you will actually finish because it makes you laugh out loud on every other page while also teaching you something genuinely worth knowing about professional behavior and career development, How to Avoid Strangers on Airplanes by Brandon C. Blewett belongs in your carry-on right now. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today. Your next flight just got a whole lot better, and your professional life is about to get a whole lot more self-aware.
