Waterproof Tea-Bags For Air Travel

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Waterproof Tea-Bags For Travel– April 2025

We frequent travelers see many things differently than most normal human beings – even things that couldn’t be more useless.

Some people look at airline apps to see if their flight is on time. We look to see if there are any empty seats next to us in our row. We don’t check the weather at our destination to decide what to pack – we check what terminal our connection is in to see how fast we’ll need to run. But the king of all perception variances has to be the so-called “priority” tags on checked luggage.

I spent most of my flying career adamantly against checking a bag. Anything that was out of my view might get lost or delayed – and on quick business trips, that’s definitely something to avoid. But as I’ve gotten older, added more leisure travel, and generally needed to carry more stuff (as older people tend to do), I’ve started checking bags more frequently. Like many other elite, frequent travelers, I always ask for the “priority tag” to go on my checked bags. Honestly, I have absolutely no idea why.

Decades ago, airline ramp staff would actually look for the bags with these tags and pull them out to go to the carousel first. I honestly can’t remember a time in the past decade or two when that’s actually happened – not once. These tags are, for all intents and purposes, useless – good for nothing other than stroking the ego of travelers who feel entitled to them.

It’s like everyone in the kindergarten class getting a shiny gold sticker just to feel special – a lovely gesture with absolutely no real value.

If you want to play a different kind of drinking game, go hang out at the baggage level of your nearest hub airport and take a shot every time someone mutters out loud “so much for the priority tags” as luggage begins to emerge on the belt.

I wonder how many of these tags are printed each year. It has to be thousands, if not millions…at least a forest or two in my lifetime. That’s a hell of a lot of brightly colored, laminated paper to be completely ignored by the people who are supposed to care about them.

So why do we still ask for them when we check our bags, as every elite traveler inevitably does? Maybe it’s FOMO. Maybe it’s the 1-in-a-5,000 chance that it’ll actually work. Or maybe – more simply – it’s one of the last few things the airlines haven’t taken away from us yet. Yes, it’s meaningless. But it’s our meaningless. And we’re clinging onto it with both hands.

I suspect that as soon as we walk away from the counter, the airline staff are giggling behind the scenes. I mean, I would be. Watching someone demand that a specific color of plastic be attached to their Samsonite just to make them feel a little more important? That's comedy gold.

At the end of the day, the priority tag is the waterproof tea bag of travel – an idea that looks purposeful, feels elite, and accomplishes absolutely nothing. But we keep using it anyway. And if that’s not the perfect metaphor for modern flying, I don’t know what is.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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