Successful Flights with Amateurs

Airports are stressful! There’s no way around it. People new to flying have the most difficult time with it, so more experienced flyers need to pack their patience and kind voices, while still being firm in the procedures. Here are some examples of travel difficulties we observed from Tirana, Albania to Seattle, Washington. Three flights. Two airlines. 5,887 Miles. With these in mind, and a little patience, your travel can be easier too.

• Passports: this identifier of each passenger must be presented at two or more checkpoints in an airport. We witnessed many people digging in checked luggage and calling other people in their parties to bring their passports to the luggage agents.

• Queuing: Some cultures abide by structured queuing, some use clustered queuing. When these two methods collide in an airport, tempers can flare like a pressure canner on full heat. Add to this boiling point airport systems that cause backups, glitchy technology or language incompatibility and the recipe just doubled as the mass of people spreads wider and longer.

Successful flyers will have less stress when they...

1. Have documents ready for officials to review repeatedly.

2. Read about the luggage size and weight requirement for their specific airline BEFORE going to the airport and plan for the extra expense of taking luggage.

3. Make sure the water bottles are empty. Most airports have refill stations or fountains near the restrooms after security.

4. Attempt to queue in the order of arrival and gently help others know where that point starts. More importantly, arrive early, pack your patience, and remember to breathe.

5. Pre-plan the entertainment for the children during the travel part of trip. Screen-time alone may not be enough. Bringing new toys they’ve never seen helps loads. If traveling without children, bring patience, noise cancelling headphones, and your own entertainment to drown out the noise.

• Children: Travel is tiring for everyone. Children have limited practice flying and even less patience. Some cried to exhaustion on the airplanes, testing everyone’s patience. But the undisciplined children make themselves known when they ran, climbed, or crawled throughout the airport and, yes, airplane. Today’s children need constant entertainment, and the wonderful parents we saw planned ahead and were engaging their children on the long transatlantic flight.

• Overweight baggage: all airlines have baggage limits for weight and size. We watched as a family unpacked two gigantic suitcases that were clearly over the weight limit.

• Water bottles: since the 9/11 bombing, airport security does not allow water bottles, liquids and semi-solids like peanut butter to pass through. Standard x-ray machines cannot detect the chemical make-up of the liquid and dangerous liquids can look identical to water. Therefore, travelers must empty the water bottle before passing security. Once Greg forgot to empty his refillable water bottle. It was flagged in the machine, so he was escorted all the way out of the security zone to dump the liquid. Then he repeated the entire identification and security process again.