Thursday, 2 May 2024
by BD Banks
In the TikTok age, videos about everything having to do with the airport experience often spread to millions of viewers. Some of these simply commiserate about the travel experience like this video capturing a misbehaving toddler while others, often filmed by flight attendants and other air crew members themselves, demystify airline processes that a layperson would not know about.
And still others speculate or have information that turns out to be completely false but spreads quicker than can be fact-checked.
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The latter occurred when, in April, TikTok account @airportlife_ posted a video of a baggage handler loading suitcases onto the plane while asking followers if they knew “why red bags are loaded first.”
The video goes on to show a half-dozen red suitcases roll in one after the other before bags and suitcases of all other colors start coming on without answering the posed question. Viewers then go on to speculate about whether this is because red bags are “less likely to get left behind when unloading” and to “prevent missing out black bags at dark corners” or to “make loading go faster.”
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Within two weeks of being posted, the video was viewed more than 70.8 million times and received more than 3.5 million upvotes. But while the premise of color-coding suitcases was largely taken as fact due to the footage of red bags rolling in one after the other, multiple sources say that this is not actually the case.
A representative of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) told aviation website Simple Flying that the video was likely “made purposely to mislead or provide false information” as no airline has been known to do this.
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“The present baggage system and process do not accommodate any loading according to color; simply, there is no space or time to do such a sorting,” the spokesperson said.
Dutch flagship carrier KLM (AFRAF) also released a response video debunking the claim that starts with similar footage of rolling bags and asks if netizens spent days “wondering why red bags are loaded first.”
“It doesn’t matter which color your luggage is!” a baggage handler wearing a KLM cap says after pushing a gray suitcase onto the loading carousel and stopping to smile into the camera. “This is such a nonsense.”
But the 80,000 views this video received came nowhere near the tens of millions garnered by the original. Many of the people who saw the latter ended up making on-the-spot decisions about luggage purchases due to not wanting their bags to be unloaded last without ever knowing that there is no need or truth behind the claim (although some people who worked as baggage handlers or other airport roles that deal with passengers’ luggage piped up in the comments to say that they have never heard of this type of loading.)
“I should have seen this video before buying my red suitcase,” wrote one TikToker named Albertina.
“Red bag sale after this video : 📉📉📉,” wrote another.
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