‘Pack your patience’: US air travel discourse in Summer 2022

The calamitous performance of airlines and airports in Summer 2022 has transformed a season that was widely touted for the post-pandemic return to travel, into a showcase of the new norms of customer abandonment in 21st-century capitalism (see Figure 1). In the blanket coverage of delayed and cancelled flights, interminable check-in queues and lost luggage in US media, one injunction has become incessant: ‘Pack Your Patience’. The phrase’s ubiquitous circulation in forms, including airport press releases, travel websites, television segment titles and the like, is of interest for its seemingly unassailable yet deeply superficial character. Notably it takes its place alongside other bromides used to school customers in resignation such as ‘It is what it is’ and ‘It’s going to get worse before it gets better’. Such exemplary late capitalist catchwords and phrases summon the spirit of ‘capitalist realism’ as defined by Mark Fisher. ¹

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Figure 1.

In Summer 2022, the phrase ‘pack your patience’ was relentlessly invoked in media coverage of the air travel crisis.

The rhetorical management of airline passenger conduct was modelled in a Today Show segment titled, ‘Holiday Travel Trouble’ broadcast on 28 June 2022. At a time when such pieces were included as a matter of course in every national morning and evening news programme, this one stands out only for slightly more direct acknowledgement of the state of the industry and impact on passengers than would be typical. The segment acknowledges upfront that travel in advance of the holiday weekend ‘may require infuriating dependence on airlines riddled with problems’ and then interviews a disgruntled traveller in an airport terminal, posing the question, ‘Is there anything you would do differently for your next trip?’ and eliciting the blunt rejoinder ‘Not go’. After advising viewers of several well-known, minimally effective and often impractical strategies for avoiding ‘Airport Armaggedon’, by way of conclusion the piece offers limply, ‘The best advice? Remember to be nice’. This draws a chorus of repetition from the in-studio hosts chiming in to attest to the value and importance of customer niceness.

The niceness dictate suppresses the systemic underpinnings of an aviation system which locks customers and workers into a state of perpetual antagonism. By obliquely invoking the question of workers’ rights, it also evades more active measures such as the formation of unions. The presumption that the tone of customer–worker encounters in a stressed ethos is set by the customer and that staff are never rude, unpleasant or unhelpful is hard to account for unless we understand it as part of a broader turn towards the shifting of affective burden to customers in a period of sharply diminished service. ²

It has been a commonplace for about a decade that when air travellers run into difficulty, they stand the best chance of receiving a timely (or any) response if they broadcast their complaint on social media. Heavier social media use and the acquisition of more technology remain the most frequently cited forms of recourse amid the current air travel crisis (the gadget du jour is the Apple AirTag, a tracking device that can help to locate your suitcase when the airline’s systems have melted down). Other platforms are available to the privileged, as former Fox News talk show host Megyn Kelly established in a laboriously detailed account nearly 20 minutes in length on her SiriusXM podcast/video simulcast The Megyn Kelly Show on 12 July 2022. In recounting her strenuous multi-week effort to retrieve her family’s five missing suitcases after a vacation to Florence, Kelly vividly relays the variety of communication platforms involved (phone calls, DMs, tweets and texts) in her attempts to break through ‘the fortress of non-humans’, the fact that ‘tweet shaming’ Air France was the only action that seemed to draw meaningful attention and effort from the carrier and her own humorous exasperation even as the number of phone calls she made in pursuit of the bags approached 100. In dealing with remote, unreachable, first name only humans (‘Guillaume’) and the airline’s chatbot (‘Louis’) Kelly carefully modulates her anger and resists noting the ironic connection between her own career as an advocate for right-wing corporatism and her current victimization by technologies wielded by the airline to hold its customers at bay. When Kelly in a pique can’t resist denominating ‘Guillaume’ as ‘Fake News Guillaume’ and ‘Louis’ as ‘Fake News Louis’, she nevertheless employs a political ‘tell’ and tactic associated with her former employer that is suggestive of exactly that connection. Fox News, of course, is notorious for its efforts to discredit unwelcome/politically objectionable figures and forces by deeming them to be sham (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

In recounting a widely shared experience of bag loss after air travel, conservative media personality Megyn Kelly used a rigorously personalized approach that centralized as characters a chatbot (‘Louis’) and an employee (‘Guillaume’) she never spoke to.

‘Pack Your Patience’ has become a mantra that sloganizes what is in fact a more authoritatively and brutally enforced expectation of consumer tolerance. It alliteratively evades what Stuart Hodkinson identifies in another context as an ‘accountability vacuum’. ³ For my purposes, the term aptly names the abnegation on the part of air carriers to provide even minimal resource pathways for customers to re-book flights, chase after lost luggage or provide other services related to industry failures. The phrase misdirects public attention away from the profit-centred actions of a commercial aviation industry which absorbs large amounts of public funding in the pandemic while nevertheless cutting back on workforce and wages. Instead, the individual actions/reactions of passengers are brought to the fore and isolated from critical contexts. The ‘Pack Your Patience’ approach to the air travel crisis shrinks the encounter to one between individuals obscuring the larger corporate decision-making which it renders invisible and incontrovertible.

Contemporary regimes of reduced service are maintained in part through the accommodationist posture customers are cued to adopt in the face of cuts as well as both the stigmatization of complaint as a form of ‘negativity’ and its neutralization into ‘feedback’. In a larger study of the ‘antagonistic interface’ that so often arises between customers and front-line staff, I argue that the prevaricating tactics, dehumanizing and deceptive practices and technical control exercised by large corporations in increasingly oligopolistic commercial environments significantly inform broadly felt experiences of alienation, anger and dispossession. This interface is often a battleground space between the middle class and its Others. ⁴

Another term widely associated with travel in Summer 2022, ‘Revenge Travel’, might suggest that customers were affectively primed for conflict as they returned to the skies this season. The rather odd turn of phrase, seemingly coined to describe the intensity with which some travellers sought to return to vacationing after a period of pandemic deprivation, is reminiscent of other recent constructions (like the notion of a ‘Revenge Body’) deployed in settings where intense desire motivates a personal goal-setting campaign. ⁵ One account drawing on interviews with industry professionals defines Revenge Travel in relation to ‘a huge increase in people wanting to make up for time and experiences lost to the pandemic’ going on to cite the owner of a luxury travel agency who associated the term with an attitude he describes as ‘Screw you, COVID, I can travel and I’m going to’. ⁶ If, indeed, the target of revenge feeling implied by ‘Revenge Travel’ is the COVID-19 virus itself, then what is notable is the impulse to strike back indirectly at an unreachable target. Another understanding of the term might construe the revenge target as those who would ‘flight shame’ travellers choosing to fly in a pandemic and amid increasingly acute signs of ecological crisis.

In addition to its de-collectivizing impacts, ‘Pack Your Patience’ sloganeering points towards a perverse impulse in which service failures on a vast scale are associated with reinforced affective discipline for customers. The phrase further evokes the striking re-positioning of customer/worker roles in which the customer must invest large amounts of time and energy to resolve seemingly endless problems with services they have paid for. ‘Pack Your Patience’ ultimately urges a quietest approach to what reads in Summer 2022 as a vast reservoir of public anger. Air(port) rage this season seems to take its place alongside other amorphous yet widely felt forms of fury and cynicism expressed in a rising number of road rage incidents, aggressive monopolization of public space by scooter and bicycle users, various manifestations of ‘toxic masculinity’ and deeply dented faith in national institutions. That anger, one suspects, will not be so easily set aside even if the number of cancelled flights, lost bags and hours spent queuing goes down in autumn when the peak travel season comes to a close.