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Airports Offering Alternatives for Banned Items

By Dan Schlossberg
ConsumerAffairs.com

December 29, 2006

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Several major airports have created alternatives aimed at keeping airport security screeners from confiscating liquids in carry-on bags.

Instead of surrendering perfumes and other pricey items, passengers can ship the items to a secure location for safekeeping.

At Chicago O'Hare, where a 60-day pilot program started in mid-December, consumers can choose between mailing the items home or sending them to the Hilton hotel at the airport.

Neither choice is free, of course, but both are better than throwing items away or adding them to the massive piles collected by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

O'Hare's program, called Mail Safe Express, features computerized kiosks that instruct consumers how to proceed. Items send to the Hilton, at a cost of $9.99 each, are blue-wrapped to guard against breakage.

Postage costs are higher: $10-$45 for lighters, knives, bottles, or other prohibited items. The kiosks handle credit-card transactions only.

Airports in New York (LaGuardia) and Houston (Intercontinental) offer similar programs while Chicago Midway, among others, is waiting to see how well the O'Hare program works.

It was off to a slow start, with only a dozen transactions in the first couple of days.

That's a drop in the ocean compared with the confiscation rate of 200,000 items a month since the liquid ban began in mid-August. Even when rules were relaxed enough to allow items of 3 ounces or less placed in plastic, zip-lock bags no larger than a quart in size, the TSA continued to separate many passengers from personal items ranging from bottled drinks to toiletries.

O'Hare officials hope the option of mailing items rather than giving them up will calm passengers who become angry when informed of the current rules regarding liquids.

Those rules went into effect after British investigators revealed a terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners with liquid-based explosives mixed in flight.

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