Hoda Kotb Met a Man on a Plane and He Keeps Asking Her Out. She's Still Too Scared

Hoda Kotb was back on Today on Monday, guest co-hosting the fourth hour with Jenna Bush Hager for the first time in nearly two years since she left the show in January 2025. And Jenna, who has never once in her life let a silence go unfilled, asked about the man on the plane.

For those not keeping up, earlier this year Kotb said she'd met a man on a flight and had the weirdest connection in the world, her words. They ran into each other again in May at the Cannes Film Festival, which is not a place most of us run into anybody we met on a plane. Sandra Bullock later grilled her about him in an interview. That's how you know you're famous: your love life gets cross-examined by an Oscar winner.

On Monday, Kotb said they've stayed in touch by text, and that he's asked her to meet him a couple of times. She hasn't. She said she was scared. Hager has now made it her personal mission to get them to a coffee shop, which is what morning television is for, I suppose. The news is in the first hour; the matchmaking is in the fourth.

I'll say this for the fellow, whoever he is. He's been asking a woman who has interviewed presidents to get a cup of coffee, and she's been ducking him for months, and he keeps sending texts. That's either romance or a very patient salesman. I mean no harm to the man; he didn't ask to be the subject of a segment. He just took a flight. That's the trouble with flying these days: you sit down for three hours and end up as a recurring bit on network television.

Kotb has handled war zones, hurricanes and Kathie Lee Gifford before ten in the morning. A coffee with a man from seat 14C, or wherever he was, should be the easy part. But it never is, is it? Most people can face a crowd of millions. It's the one person across the table that scares them.