“We’ve seen enough. We’ve had enough. It’s time to ban pajamas at Tampa International Airport,” a tongue-in-cheek social media post from the Florida facility decreed this week.
Describing the sartorially questionable decision some passengers make to show up for flights while sporting sleepwear as a “crisis,” the post claims the airport has previously eradicated Crocs from the terminals. Now Tampa has your jammies in its sights.
They’re joking, as airport officials confirmed to USA Today in a notably humorless statement.
But the satirical social media post does fall in line with the very real “Golden Age of Travel” campaign launched by the U.S. Department of Transportation last fall.
Intended to inspire a “return to civility” in air travel amid a “record surge in unruly passengers,” the campaign includes “dressing with respect” as one of its core pillars.
As Frommer’s contributor Bill McGee has demonstrated, this is the same Department of Transportation that has presided over a dispiriting rollback of consumer protections for air travelers. Rather than focus on, say, making airlines quote you accurate prices for flights, the federal government would rather criticize what you wear.
“I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better, which encourages us to maybe behave a little better,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said when discussing the campaign. “Let’s try not to wear slippers and pajamas as we come to the airport.”
Now, it’s true that some passengers arrive at their gates in the sorts of getups that make you want to ask, You did know you’d be going out in public today, right?
But it doesn’t seem entirely fair to clutch one’s pearls—which one definitely puts on every day like the ever-respectful dresser one is—and pine for the days when people wouldn’t be caught dead without their hats and gloves in the Pan Am cabin.
You have to acknowledge, first, that air travel has become a pretty miserable ordeal since that era, and you can’t really blame the passengers for most of the misery.
What with all the fees and the lines and the flight delays and the $11 bottles of water and the squawking public announcements and the endless construction projects and the interminable hikes between concourses and the broken-down trams and every other indignity airports inflict upon travelers, is it any wonder some of us, to borrow a phrase from Frommer’s editor in chief Jason Cochran, “dress for stress”?
Not to mention the rollback of many passenger protections enacted during the Biden Administration.
And now government and airport officials want to pick on those same passengers for trying to make themselves comfortable in such an uncomfortable environment?
Oh sure, blame the victims.
