7 Expert Insider Tips That Will Make Flying Less Miserable

Don’t drink the coffee, bring your own headphones, and don’t bother locking your suitcase. Those are just a few of the tips being offered by anonymous airline and airport employees in a recent discussion thread on Reddit. Here are a few tips and tricks picked up from the conversation:

Locks on Zippered Suitcases are Useless

According to user royalsiblings, “You can pop a zipper with a pen and drag the locked zipper pulls around the bag to close them back up. I’ve done this many times to identify bags that are tagless and locked. Exactly like this.”

Bring Your Own Headphones

“I used to work for warehouse that supplied a certain airline with items. The headsets that are given to you are not new, despite being wrapped up. They are taken off the flight, “cleaned”, and then packaged again,” said Reddit user ichigo29.

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Remove Old Flight Tags

“Not a secret, just common sense; the reason some bags miss their flight or get misrouted is because passengers don’t remove old tags. It confuses handlers as well as the conveyor belt scanners. I see it happen all the time,” said Redditor –aurelius.

Be Kind to Employees

“The nicer you are to us, the more we can do for you. Ran out of beef? Ask politely and we will get you a fillet mignon from first class. Your neighbour is noisy? Tell us nicely and we might be able to get you a better seat,” said flight attendant and Redditor ihatcoe

“Be nice to the ticket agent and they will pretty much always let you get away with overweight bags. If you were funny, I’d even not charge you for bags,” said WorseToWorser.

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Buy and Fly on a Tuesday

“I work Revenue Management for an airline. On average, the cheapest time to BUY a ticket is Tuesday afternoon. The cheapest time to FLY is Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday. This applies to US flights in my experience,” said Redditor Drama_Llama

Maybe Skip the Coffee

“The coffee is absolutely disgusting because the no one washes the container that goes out every morning. The station agents who get paid way too little don’t give a shit about cleaning it. I certainly didn’t when I worked for AA. Also, because we weren’t given the proper supplies to clean it. We pretty much just rinsed it out and dumped coffee into it,” said WorseToWorser.

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Put Your Pet’s Name on the Carrier

“If you checked your dog there’s about a 30 percent chance it’s terrified before it even gets on the plane, who knows how scared it gets during the actual flight. Bag room agents will usually try to comfort a scared animal, but all we can really do is talk to it, so if you write your pet’s name on their carrier it usually helps a lot,” said Redditor RabbitMix.

This article originally appeared on Travel + Leisure