The One Thing I’ll Never Understand About Travellers And Airports

• Luggage wrapping surged after Schapelle Corby’s 2004 arrest, tapping into national paranoia that drugs could be planted in anyone’s bag.
• The practice offers little real protection, but it gives anxious travellers a false sense of control and security.
• Despite better modern solutions, some still cling to wrapping as a psychological ritual, driven more by fear than logic.

There’s one thing I’ll never understand about modern travel: why people still cling-wrap their luggage like they’re smuggling state secrets.

Every time I see a suitcase shrink-wrapped in fluorescent plastic, it feels like we’ve stepped back into 2004. The entire practice reminds me of one moment in Australian cultural history that refuses to die: the Schapelle Corby saga.

Schapelle Corby’s 2004 arrest in Bali for smuggling 4.2 kilograms of weed in a boogie board bag flipped the national psyche. Her defence was that baggage handlers planted the drugs. Whether you bought that or not, the seed of paranoia had been planted. What if it could happen to anyone? What if someone tampered with your bag?

It didn’t help that the story kept resurfacing. Kathryn Bonella’s series of explosive books on the Balinese drug trade, from Hotel K to Snowing in Bali, made Corby’s version of events seem even shakier in hindsight. The idea that she was an unwitting victim became harder to believe the more you read about how things really worked.

Still, the fear stuck. Airports across the country brought in wrap stations. Travellers who had never considered it before suddenly felt safer watching their suitcase get entombed in plastic. It became a pre-flight ritual, like grabbing a last-minute meat pie or stocking up on duty-free.

The problem is, wrapping your luggage doesn’t actually protect it from anything important. It won’t stop security from opening your bag. It won’t stop a thief from cutting it open. It won’t stop damage. What it does do is make nervous people feel like they’ve taken control. It’s less about security and more about soothing travel anxiety.

We’ve since moved on to smart locks, zipless designs and polycarbonate hard cases. But wrapping still lingers. For some, it’s a psychological crutch. They don’t trust the systems in place, so they build their own bubble. Quite literally.

You can spot them easily. They’re early to the gate. They double-check boarding passes at least four times. They probably own a money belt. They spend $100 on a roll of plastic and call it peace of mind.

If you’re genuinely worried about damage or theft, there are better options. Luggage covers exist. So do cases built to survive being launched from a moving vehicle. But wrapping? That’s theatre. It’s a throwback to a time when fear dictated how we packed our bags.

We’re not protecting our luggage anymore. We’re just holding on to a very outdated fear. And somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves it made sense.

Where are we even going, and why are we still packing like we’re guest-starring on Border Security? Cocaine? Wooooooah.