02 Mar 6 Top Secret Tips From Airline Employees

For starters, don’t drink the coffee, do bring your own headphones, and don’t bother locking your suitcases. These were just some of the tips we found from a rather eye opening conversation among airline employees on a recent Reddit thread.

Here were some of the secrets they shared anonymously:

Locks on zippered suitcases are useless: According to one airport employee, “You can pop a zipper with a pen and drag the locked zipper tabs around the bag to close them back up. I’ve done this many times to identify bags that are tagless and locked.”

Bring your own headphones: “I used to work for warehouse that supplied a certain airline with items. The headsets that are given to you are not new, despite being wrapped up. They are taken off the flight, ‘cleaned,’ and then packaged again,” said another Reddit user.

Remove old flight tags: “Not a secret, just common sense; the reason some bags miss their flight or get misrouted is because passengers don’t remove old tags. It confuses handlers as well as the conveyor belt scanners. I see it happen all the time.” This subject came up time after time during the course of the conversation as a huge pet peeve to handlers.

Be kind to employees: “The nicer you are to us, the more we can do for you. Ran out of beef? Ask politely and we will get you a fillet mignon from first class. Your neighbor is noisy? Tell us nicely and we might be able to get you a better seat,” said flight attendant and Redditor ihatcoe. “Be nice to the ticket agent and they will pretty much always let you get away with overweight bags. If you’re funny, I’d even not charge you for bags,” said user WorseToWorser.

Maybe skip the coffee, okay, definitely skip the coffee: “The coffee is absolutely disgusting because the no one washes the container every morning. The station agents who get paid way too little don’t care about cleaning it. I certainly didn’t when I worked for AA. Also, because we weren’t given the proper supplies to clean it, we pretty much just rinsed out the old stuff and dumped coffee into it,” said WorseToWorser.

Put your pet’s name on the carrier: “If you checked your dog there’s about a 30 percent chance it’s already terrified before it even gets on the plane, who knows how scared it gets during the actual flight. Bag room agents will usually try to comfort a scared animal, but all we can really do is talk to it, so if you write your pet’s name on their carrier it usually helps a lot,” said Redditor RabbitMix.