Nick Ryan: I feel sorry for the one bloke still employed as baggage handler

If the airlines want people to travel again, they could put some effort in making this ordeal less unbearable, writes Nick Ryan.

Right now, we’re a nation of kelpies cooped up with full bladders for two years and someone’s just opened the fly screen door. Australians are ‘‘outta here’’.

For the past few weeks I’ve been one of them, hanging out in Spain and France and hearing almost as many people who sound like me as they do Rafa Nadal or Emanuel Macron.

It’s not that surprising really. We’re a country with wanderlust in the water supply.

We’re a multicultural nation with strong familial ties beyond our borders and extended families made distant by a pandemic. We just like to roam.

What is surprising is how those that should know better seem to have been caught completely off-guard.

Anyone who thinks wearing a mask on a plane is the biggest problem with travel in a post-pandemic world clearly hasn’t gone anywhere lately. If the journey is half the fun, then nobody’s having any fun.

Airports are annoying places at the best of times, but in a post-Covid world they’re too often hellish. Understaffed, inefficient and doing the bare minimum to get by.

The airport has gotten worse since the world opened up. Picture: iStock

Getting through security can be a process longer than the flight you’re trying to board.

Where once two lanes were open to board the plane, now there’s only one and people still scratch their heads at why so many flights depart late.

The person I feel sorry in all of this is the one bloke still employed as baggage handler in this country. He must be exhausted.

Last Monday morning I stood at a baggage carousel at Melbourne’s international terminal as my connecting flight to Adelaide took off overhead.

The old rule of giving yourself 90 minutes between connections no longer applies when you spend 70 of those minutes standing by a baggage carousel as one bag every couple of minutes comes off a completely chockers A380.

And I had priority luggage tags on too. I suspect there’s some poor bastard still standing there waiting for his suitcase to come sliding down the chute.

The one upside of being forced to wait another couple of hours for flight that pushed what was already a 24-hour travel time past the 30-hour mark, was the time to take a shower in the lounge while I waited.

Apparently not, according to the one staff member allocated to run the lounge. No towels had been delivered so even that minor perk of the process was denied.

I know it’s kind of churlish to whinge about such things, and when weighed up against seeing sorely missed friends and reconnecting to a life beyond our borders the inconvenience is still worth it, but if the airline industry wants us to bounce back in the way the desperately need us too, then they seriously need to put a bit of effort into making flying less of an ordeal.