This week thousands of Americans catching flights to New York, Los Angeles and other cities across the US were encouraged to join the ‘Don’t Touch My Junk’ campaign and refuse full body searches during the busy Thanksgiving period.
Adding further fuel to the fire, a passenger passing through Orlando International Airport this week claimed she was picked out for a ‘pat down’ by male staff who had been ogling her chest.
With Americans up in arms over body scanners and pat downs, flightscomparison site Skyscanner reveals what flyers find most frustrating about airport security measures.
The results seem to show support for the ‘Don’t Touch My Junk’ campaign with 46% of all respondents stating they had they had felt uncomfortable during an airport security pat down; 34% said they’d “felt a little embarrassed”, whilst one in eight claimed they’d “felt violated”.
The length of security check queues were also a big bone of contention, with 57% saying they felt the queues were “always too long”. Perhaps highlighting travellers’ frustrations with the lengthy and stringent checks, a massive 43% of travellers admitted to having smuggled banned items past security staff; 29% had done so by accident, but 14% confessed to smuggling knowingly.
The frustration continued with 25% saying security staff they were “grumpy and patronising”. However, the greatest source of irritation is in fact not the checks themselves, but fellow travellers who held up queues.
The top frustrations for flyers were:
- Being delayed by people who had not obeyed the security rules, and therefore held everybody else up
- The length of queues, especially when empty, unmanned channels were being unused
- The ‘100ml liquids and gels rule’
- Having to take your belt and shoes off
- Parents having to taste baby food and milk
- Having your bag searched
