Is CNN Right To Blame Carry-Ons For Frustrating Holiday Travel?

November 19, 2009 at 9:19 AM | by Omri | Comment (1)

We've talked about this before in a much broader context, but there really is something about packing the overhead bins that turns people into animals. It's not stress; no one was pushing in line on the skyway to the plane. It's not rational anger; people should be calmer the closer they are to settling in for the flight. And it makes no interpersonal sense as people rarely fight that viciously over armrests or seat pitches, both of which are at least as important on a long flight. There's just something about putting "my stuff" in "my space" that drives people absolutely insane.

Now CNN has taken that basic psychological fact and somehow spun an entire article out of it. The basic idea: business travelers live by a set of unwritten guidelines that holiday travelers—the clumsy aviation bumpkins of our story—comically stumble into. Or not so comically, since Jim Kavanagh of CNN seems to believe that this tension is a match at the fuse of all holiday travel. He's obviously on the right track since there really is something weird about the way people stow luggage. But in another way he's very definitely wrong. First let's look at his little sociological writeup:

'Business travelers do this every day,' said Joe Brancatelli, whose Web site, joesentme.com, is a destination for frequent fliers. 'They know the rules of the sizes they're allowed to carry. They know the size of the space available to them on the plane they're flying, and they're prepared to hit the rules. What bugs them is when someone else doesn't know the rules.' Online discussion boards are full of stories about travelers who don't know the right way to put a bag in the overhead bin or who just bring too much with them. 'The lady next to me had so much stuff it was insane. I boarded the flight after she did, and she occupied the storage space of the seat in front of not only her window seat, but my seat too!' Michael Wand, a frequent flier from Honolulu, Hawaii, wrote on flyertalk.com.

On a very basic level, we're skeptical that business travelers with preferential boarding have to fight with plebes for overhead space. The reason we're skeptical is that we understand how space and time work, and what concepts like "before" and "after" mean. A business traveler who has to board with everyone else isn't a business traveler. He's just a guy who travels infrequently but still knows his way around airport bars. We're obviously sympathetic but that doesn't justify getting all superior.

Now what does justify going ballistic on amateur travelers is their inexplicable yet apparently transcendental inability to navigate security checkpoints. Hey you! You with the wife in sweatpants and the two kids with Cinnabon smeared into their hair. YES YOU! What does this sign say? Does it say that you have to remove electronics but hold on to your boarding pass? IS THAT WHAT THIS SIGN SAYS?! Then why didn't you do that? Why did you choose to do something that's the opposite of that?

[Photo: Nick Gray / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Carry-ons could clog holiday travel [CNN]
· Carry On Policy [Jaunted]
· Holiday Travel [Jaunted]

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