Flying with Family, Labeled A Human Trafficker: Are Airlines Taking Profiling Too Far? [Roundup]

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About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. I honestly think this kinda thing is Absolutely Dispicable and I can’t imagine any airlines company pulling such Shady profilling on travellers and the reason I say this is because I could surely see something like this blowing up in there faces

  2. When airlines do policing actions that have nothing to do with airline operations, they need to get sued until they start behaving correctly. How many real trafficking situations have they stopped, anyway?

  3. I’m agreed with @Robin and @jns: This is wholly inappropriate for unskilled FA’s to be reporting, unfair to both them and the PAX involved. What should happen instead is to migrate this to the Security Checkpoint, where you have both TSA Staff and Armed Officers. It wouldn’t be too difficult for them to set up a standard protocol, with higher ID success rates and lower stress for the innocent.

  4. They are NOT taught to use their prejudices. They are taught to look for warning signs. l think Gary, who keeps posting this stuff, is either unaware of human trafficking or indifferent to it. False positives will happen. That’s better than false negatives which will lead to a life of unspeakable horror for someone.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38880612
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBZU85DTD1U
    https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/human-trafficking-american-airlines/

  5. We almost never hear of successful human trafficking interdictions. One would think we would at least hear of as many positives as negatives. I understand some of them may be suppressed to prevent the minors from being identified, but nearly none?

    My daughter was getting questioned about how old she was by Clear, in what seemed to be a human trafficking line of questioning. She was 29 at the time, but looked 18, and was travelling with her then fiancee.

    Does anyone have any statistics on how often these programs really work? The most recent data from 2022 showed there were 115,000 trafficking victims identified around the world, but it didn’t identify how many were identified by flight attendants. It did say that 80% of international trafficking victims traveled by air, but frequently traveled by themselves with mistaken ideas of what was going to happen. A lot of the trafficking is economic, not all are trafficked for sex work.

    It’s a big problem, but I’m not sure domestic flights is the biggest target.

  6. “False positives will happen. That’s better than false negatives which will lead to a life of unspeakable horror for someone.” But, we observe false positives, but not false negatives. So, we look at false + frequency vis a vis true +. The false + makes these blogs, but I can’t remember the headline of an FA catching a true +. Of course, we want ever possible case of HT stopped, but we can ignore the cost of false +.

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