A video about a woman who must see the departure gate with her own eyes “to make sure it really exists” before she can relax at the airport has gone viral on Instagram.
The clip was shared by Alexandra Undem (@lexienoelleundem), known as Lexie, a 30-year-old content creator and brand marketing manager for Picking Daisies Media who is based in North Dakota. The video has had 6.8 million views since it was posted on November 4.
A note overlaid on the video reads: “the millennial urge to walk all the way to the gate to make sure it really exists with my own eyes before finding food or something to drink.”
The footage shows a view of a departure gate which was taken on November 3 at Minneapolis Airport, Lexie told Newsweek.
“I never fly without first checking for the gate,” she said, noting that so far, she’s never been in a situation where a departure gate didn’t exist.
The viral post comes as more than half (57 percent) of Americans are preparing for winter travel, with 96 percent planning to travel as much as or even more than they did last winter, according to TripAdvisor’s Winter Travel Index.
New York, Las Vegas and parts of Florida are among Americans’ top domestic travel destinations for this winter, while Cancún, Mexico, is their favorite international winter spot, the study by TripAdvisor found.
Air travel has shown continued strong growth in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. Total passenger demand in August increased by 8.6 percent, compared with the same month in 2023, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported in October.
The load factor—the percentage of available seats an airline sells on its flights—hit a record high of 86.2 percent in August, according to the IATA report.
‘This Is Me Too’
A caption shared with the viral Instagram post says: “I don’t know what it is, but even if I have a 3+ hour layover, I’m always going to walk ALL the way to the gate to see it with my own eyes.”
The poster told Newsweek: “I have never not fully found a gate. I have, however, found ones that are in completely different wings of the airport, numbers skipped and the gate added at the end (non-chronological order).”
She’s also faced “last minute changes where I have had my phone tell me one gate, only to arrive at the gate and the destination has changed, while the gate for my flight was reassigned 60 gates away,” with her phone still indicating she was at the correct gate.
The poster, who has a 4-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son with her husband Shane, told Newsweek: “I’ve been a regular flyer since my first flight when I was 17 years old…I have probably over 50 flights since then.”
Their children have traveled the world with the couple and the family has “a goal to see all 50 states together and as many national parks and other countries as we can,” Lexie noted.
Several users on Instagram could relate to the passenger in the viral clip.
User heatherslg said: “I always do this but did not know it was a millennial thing. Bless my heart.”
“Stop. It’s not a millennial urge. We all do it,” said kathykatkitty_.
User a_life_that_is_good_ noted: “I’m 19 & this is me too !!”
“I do 60 flights a year, and every time, I go to check if it’s there,” noted pt.a.k.
User kraftj87 said: “All it takes is that one airport that decided to put gate 9 in an annex between gates 32 and 17. And I never trusted another one.”
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