A newly unearthed video shows just how poorly your checked luggage gets treated by airline staff who, it seems, couldn’t care less if they tried…
With all the unforeseen difficulties that travel can bring — from a man urinating all over business class to a disgusting sock-stuffed seat, from a woman being publicly weighed in the airport to a hostess being beaten with an in-flight phone — you’d at least hope that your precious luggage, which we all hand over to airlines in good faith and trust they’ll look after our hard-earned possessions, will get taken care of properly.
Unfortunately, a newly surfaced video that was shared on Instagram by Skiplagged proves that all too often, nothing could be further from the truth. The short but scarily impactful video shows airport ground staff — working out of a United Airlines holding area but not yet confirmed to be a United employee — throwing passengers’ checked luggage down a black chute with pretty reckless abandon, allowing luggage to stack up at the bottom of the chute with bags crashing into one another at high speed.
The most appalling moment comes when the utterly disinterested worker, who barely seems to be present or engaged with his work in the first place, adds another shameless element to his practice when he lets a bag slide down the chute and crashes into the already-amassed pile of bags at such speed that it skims off the other bags and flies through the air before crashing down onto the tarmac. To add insult to injury, and to tip this tragic video into a near-farcical realm, he then does exactly the same thing only seconds later.
WATCH: In all our years covering travel, this is one of the worst videos we’ve seen.
Responses to the video were universally disgruntled but laid blame and placed emphasis on different aspects of the wider air travel industry. Two of the top-rated comments seemed to take direct aim at the worker involved, criticising his lack of work ethic, respect for others’ possessions, and even threatening the dismissal of an entire workforce.
“If you hate your job don’t do it,” one commenter put it. Another concurred: “this is why machines will take over their jobs.
Others chose to take aim at the airlines themselves, both for their hiring and management abilities, which are evidently somewhat lacking. One savvy commenter reminded readers to “take photos before and after” travelling so that you can reliably document any damage caused. Another took a more sympathetic approach, choosing to call out poor airline pay and a lack of worker power in the United States as potential reasons for such apathetic behaviour:
“Some airline baggage handlers starting pay is $13.50 an hour. They can’t choose days or shifts at some airlines either. Not justifying this but let’s be real for a second.”
@doc_johnson_
In the chaotic world of air travel, it seems our luggage isn’t excluded from the wild ride. So next time you’re headed overseas, buckle up, hope for the best, and pray that your luggage does the same.