SFO Has Some of the Most Well-Behaved Travelers in the US. Bartenders Think They Know Why.
Aug. 8—Andrew Decena has worked at the San Francisco International Airport for almost 20 years and has seen some things during his time here.
He's a bartender at the SFO outpost for the popular Oakland bar Drake's Dealership and estimates that it goes through about eight kegs a week now — about the number of kegs they went through pre-pandemic.
And he's aware that unruly passengers are increasingly a phenomenon that many airports, flight attendants and pilots are forced to contend with as air travel returns to some semblance of the before-times.
But Decena says no major unruly behavior has happened during his experiences working at SFO during the pandemic.
"I've heard elsewhere ... like, on the news, or I've heard from other airports, on flights in particular," he said. "You know, here at least they're civilized. I've seen some interesting people coming, but nothing too crazy, nothing violent."
The "unruly passenger" phenomenon is a multi-pronged, complex issue — one that has gained national attention as videos of disruptive and sometimes violent passengers regularly go viral.
The Federal Aviation Administration reports 3,715 unruly passenger incidents so far in 2021.
According to one survey by the Association of Flight Attendants, the key factors are mask-wearing, alcohol consumption and flight issues. (Nearly 85% of flight attendants surveyed said they experienced a bad passenger on their flights.)
And while unruly passengers are a constant part of air travel, it's never been this dire. ABC News reports that the number of "potential violations of federal law" with unruly passengers is at a record high.
Much has been focused on mask-wearing. Per the FAA, nearly three-quarters of the thousands of incidents reported this year are linked to disputes over wearing masks.
But SFO seems to have seen less trouble than other airports, at least based on anecdotes offered by some SFO workers.
A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration told SFGATE that they do not keep track of "unruly passenger" behavior by each airport, but it does have a public set of data available to (loosely) extrapolate data from.
Of the 43 cases made public by the agency in 2021 because of fines and other civil penalties levied against passengers, at least 11 were related to alcohol. None took place in SFO.
Airports that host a comparable number of people to SFO have also recorded incidents that led to FAA fines and bans. Miami had 2 reports, and Boston had 3 — and both flew fewer domestic passengers than SFO in 2020.
Part of that has to do with masking. The Bay Area is among the most vaccinated in the nation, and as Mark Baldassare, the president of the Public Policy Institute of California, told the San Francisco Chronicle, those who are vaccinated are most willing to mask up, even if begrudgingly. (SFGATE and the Chronicle are both owned by Hearst, but operate independently of one another.)
Andrew R. Thomas, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron and an expert on airport rage, says that attention on unruly passengers has never been this high in the decades he's spent tracking this behavior.
He said he fears that focusing solely on masking, though, sensationalizes the issue — and said he wants focus to be expanded to other issues as well.
"There's a lot of other parts of the country that almost never wore masks throughout all of this," Thomas told SFGATE. "But I think that a lot of people want to write and say that that's the driving force here, that it's the people who want to fight over masks that are the ones that are driving the unruly passenger problem."
"I think, though, it minimizes the other contributing factors," he added.
He's studied unruly passengers for decades now, and he's found that alcohol consumption remains a constant, even as at least two large airlines — American and Southwest — prohibit sales of booze on flights because of bad passengers.
Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, Thomas estimates that about 40% to 50% of "unruly passengers" were intoxicated.
The pandemic, coupled with the stress of passing through 21st century airport security, has made fliers more tense on flights.
The stress of traveling during the pandemic — worries about proximity to other people, flight cancellations and delays aplenty — Thomas says, creates a "dangerous cocktail" when alcohol is thrown in.
People turn to alcohol when they're stressed, and as he points out, drinking is one of the few socially acceptable vices to indulge in at an airport — so travelers end up turning to the sauce, sometimes with consequences.
"The only thing you really can do in airports — there's not a lot of restaurants that have opened — is the bars seem to be open, you got a lot of people that are drinking. Alcohol has always been associated with air travel."
(After all, it's illegal to be intoxicated on a flight — but rarely have passengers been prosecuted for bad behavior.)
But back to SFO: Why haven't bartenders seen much of an issue, even as drinking has returned to mostly normal levels? And could other airports take something away from them? — At Harvey Milk Terminal 1, as in most airport terminals nationwide, the most packed sitdown establishments are the bars. Even on a Monday afternoon, the Drake's Flyaway and the Bourbon Pub are filled with customers — the bars at both mostly seated with travelers.
And many of the walk-up, non-bar establishments sell booze, including Goldilocks and Bun Mee — none of which sell booze at their non-airport locations.
It's just good business, said Iva Chen at Lady Luck Gourmet, which owns and operates the Goldilocks at SFO.
"Well, this is the airport, right? Everybody drinks at the airport. ... You'd be losing out on a chunk of sales if you didn't offer it," Chen said.
Even the Burger King at Terminal 1, Chen joked, sells booze.
"Alcohol has always been a revenue generator for, for the airports and to a lesser extent, now the airlines," Thomas acknowledges.
But there's perhaps a difference between getting a beer with your lunch or a couple of pre-flight drinks and getting intoxicated on a flight.
Jesus Trevino, the general manager at the Bourbon Pub at SFO, knows this difference.
When asked whether the Michael Mina-branded pub had any significant changes to sales post-vaccine, he didn't really notice any key difference. But part of that is due to a pandemic policy they've introduced.
"We're not selling more or less than we were before," he said. "Really, one of the biggest things is the airlines. Obviously, they did not want people to bring in liquor, to, to the airplane themselves, and it's really hard to control that if they're not on the property, right, so we are not doing liquor to-go."
That's a policy that Drake's also enforces.
It's a relatively new policy, one that seemingly breaks through a key issue of how to deal with "unruly passengers."
"The issue there is one that really is at the heart of the whole unruly passenger problem going back 30 years now is enforcement," Thomas says. Do San Francisco police punish intoxicated fliers? Does TSA? Do gate agents?
It's a testament to San Francisco fliers that no one's especially peeved about the no to-go drinks policy, Trevino said.
"I would say 95 times out of 100 when we say that we're not doing drinks to go, people are like, 'OK, I'll just drink it real fast.'"
Part of it, too, could be that the Bay Area tends to be more cautious at airports — even when it comes to drinking.
"A lot of people, with things happening the way that they are," Decena, the Drake's barkeep, said, "have been enjoying themselves but they're also still being cautious."
And the reason why, Trevino says, is because he's seen what even one drink can do.
"I've seen somebody come in, have one glass of wine and almost fall asleep because they took something."
So, even as a trend of bad flight behavior continues to rattle flights nationwide, SFO hasn't entered the spotlight too often — and bartenders are probably a big reason why.
"We're very careful about those kinds of things," Trevino says.
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