While our family travels mostly outside the Disney sphere, I don’t actually write much general travel content here. But the launch of “Families on the Fly” by TSA caught by eye because it’s launching at Orlando International Airport, the primary airport for air travel to Disney World. So, what is this new offering from TSA and how will it impact your next trip? Let’s find out!
DHS and TSA Launch “Families on the Fly”
Last Friday, TSA and DHS announced the “Families on the Fly” campaign. Generally, this is an “initiative designed to enhance hospitality for families during the airport security screening experience,” and it includes three new benefits:
Dedicated family lanes at select airports nationwide
Discounted TSA PreCheck fees for families coming soon
Dedicated TSA PreCheck lanes for service members and their families
It’s the first one of these that I want to focus on, because the announcement lists Orlando International (MCO) and Charlotte-Douglas International (CLT) as the two “current participating airports.” MCO is, of course, the main airport guests will use when visiting Disney World, so it’s highly relevant to this site.
As an aside, I just want to clarify that I believe TSA is using “family” here to refer to parties on the same reservation with a child 12 or under, but I can’t recall where I got that notion.
But if your group qualifies under whatever the TSA standards for “family” are, you’ll soon (presently?) have a dedicated TSA lane when flying out of MCO. Some details remain unclear to me (and research has been unsuccessful), including how this works with PreCheck and CLEAR, but hopefully those are revealed in short order.
Commentary
Let’s start with the party poopers. I’m sure there are many, many naysayers who object to families with young children getting special treatment, and I’ve got two responses to them.
The first is one is soapboxy, but it’s probably worth thinking on—the country (and the world) benefits from having its citizens visit other places and interact with other people. Maybe making it easier for young kids to travel is a longterm good for the world, and maybe it’s okay for other people to get things you don’t get sometimes.
The second is practical. This will, ideally, make things better for everyone. Every family having a conversation about formula allowances and which of their kids’ devices to take out of their bags in a dedicated security line is a family not slowing down your line.
Believe me, I don’t berate my child for every slow step in a security line because I’m bitter I could never make it as a drill sergeant. I do it because, like many parents, I can tell when someone’s self-satisfaction in being a very important business traveler demands they practically hope for my child to slip up. I don’t like the feeling of kid-haters watching my kid’s every move anymore than they like the feeling of having to co-exist with a small human for 30 seconds. Maybe the experience will be better for everyone if we go our separate ways, as it were.
Buuuuut, the flipside of this is that the dedicated family line might not be all its cracked up to be. In 5 years of travel with Zoe to 18 countries, we’ve been shuttled into a variety of family lanes. Some were godsends and seemed to save us an hour or more. Others…were not.
Ironically, you want to launch a service like this in the place where its most “needed”, like Orlando. But this also means the dedicated queue will potentially see very high demand. If it becomes mandatory for families to use this line, then I’ll have real complaints. (And keep in mind that “mandatory” is basically at the discretion of whichever agent is standing at the front of the queue that day.)
This brings us to a bigger issue—the mess that is airport security queuing. Our family has TSA PreCheck and CLEAR. We use CLEAR only if it appears clearly shorter than PreCheck, because quite often it’s actually slower, and overall TSA PreCheck moves more consistently. (MCO also has CLEAR Reserve, yet another similar option.)
Our closest airport, LGA, also has a dedicated queue for some sort of Delta priority security, along with some sort of opt-in facial recognition TSA scanning queue that I guess is or isn’t different from the facial recognition scanning they sometimes use in the regular TSA lines. Now I guess we’ll also have a family queue, and some airports now have expedited military queues.
And I forgot, sometimes an airport doesn’t even have a real PreCheck queue. Sometimes they give you a card that says you’re PreCheck, but you stay in the regular queue. You’re still supposed to take everything out of your bags, though—because it’s the regular queue—and if you don’t, you’ll be delayed.
This is all a bit silly. None of us thinks the problem with security checkpoints is that we fall short of the Baskin-Robbins number of queues. Quite the opposite.
Besides adding some clunkiness at the start of the process, all the variance in the queues also means there’s a lack of uniformity when people get to the actual screening. Some people haven’t heard the TSA agent say exactly what comes out and what stays in a dozen times because they just skipped the whole line. Or, see my above TSA-PreCheck-but-in-the-regular-queue point.
These general grievances shouldn’t take away from what could be specific benefits here, though. A TSA line dedicated to families with young children would be able have specialized signage or verbal instructions to help those families prepare for their screenings. Simply adding such signage to the regular queue would just exacerbate the problem of information overload for everyone else, so the dedicated line has a virtue here.
My bottom line is that while I hope this serves as a bandaid for some time, I’m not sure it needs to be a permanent part of our future. Indeed, with recent changes to shoe policy giving way to grumblings about the persistence of the liquids policy, we might hope for a more cohesive, sensible system going forward. Maybe we’ll even get to the point where everyone—child, guardian, and very important business person—can co-exist in a line for, say, 15 minutes max, and then get on with our trips.
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