Navigating airports and airplanes can be stressful at the best of times. As millions of travelers take to the skies over the busy holiday period, that built-in stress can hit new heights.

In the US, the now-ended government shutdown has also brought weeks of travel uncertainty. While shutdown-related flight disruptions have been resolved , travelers might still be feeling the anxiety.

But holiday travel doesn’t have to be a pressure cooker waiting to explode — just ask the world’s flight attendants. If anyone’s got surviving holiday travel down, it’s these aviation experts who fly every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

To learn from their wisdom, CNN Travel chatted with Florida-based flight attendant Hunter Smith-Lihas, who works as a flight attendant on a major US airline, and

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