There’s nothing quite like flying to bring out the worst in all of us and the frustrations of air travel have only gotten worse since the pandemic’s emerged.
And when one of these frustrations put a damper on someone’s day, we’ll often notice their first reaction is to take their problems out on airline staff. But while there’s at least one employee we’re going to have a genuinely bad experience with in our lives, it’s worth noting that many of them are trying to ensure your flight goes as easily as possible.
After all, a hard flight for you tends to become hard for them too. And that’s why it’s not hard to get a wealth of advice from flight attendants as to how you make your ride the most comfortable and especially the most sanitary it can be.
But of course, there are some things that come up before you even get on the plane and for those matters, we have to turn to some completely different travel experts.
Since it’s hardly unusual to pay through the nose to get all your stuff on a plane, it’s perhaps not surprising that many of the travel lifehacks we see are all about skirting this problem.
So some TikTokers have taken it upon themselves to smuggle extra clothes into unusual items to get around their airlines’ baggage allowances. As we can see, one of those strategies involves carefully stuffing a bunch of them into a pillow case.
And while Naveen Dittakavi — the founder of a travel service for cheap flights called Next Vacay — told Insider that the hack was worth trying because most airlines do let travelers bring a pillow on, he warned that they can vary on how big that pillow’s allowed to be.
Because if they just want travel pillows and consider a full-sized one to be an “allotted personal item,” you might get dinged with an extra cost no matter what you do.
Another hack saw a woman bundle a bunch of clothes together and roll them up so she could disguise them as a neck pillow.
And while Dittakavi found this hack pretty brilliant too, he saw the same problem with this one as the other pillow. Namely, that an airline with no baggage allowance is likely to treat this as an allotted personal item if you’ve also got a backpack or something in the space under the seat.
Bianca Motalvo from United Airlines agreed, saying the fact that the “pillow” is obviously made from clothes could make it suspicious to gate agents, who “may or may not ask for all items to be packed properly.”
Finally, we have one woman who apparently snuck eight extra jackets onto her plane by disguising them as one.
As far as latestdeals.co.uk founder Tom Church could tell, the only way this hack could possibly work is if the resulting coat monster manages to fit under the seat. Otherwise, you’ll likely be told to pack it just like the “neck pillow.”
In his words, “Carrying items of this size onto a plane doesn’t seem very practical. It would be better to ask yourself if you really need so many clothes when you have to lug them around like this.”
So what do they recommend doing instead of these hacks?
For his part, Church swears by vacuum-sealed bags that compress clothes into the smallest possible space by sucking all the air out. He said that using them can give you about 50% extra space.
And while he also recommended using a full-sized bag for a child instead of a kid’s bag, Montalvo recommended using small bags called packing cubes to both pack and organize your suitcase.
h/t: Insider
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