Anyone who’s been on the internet has likely heard about how “United Breaks Guitars,” a song made by a Canadian musician whose guitar was destroyed by careless staff. Unsurprisingly, one passenger from California can share the same story for their guitar after it was smashed in half by Delta staff who forced it to be gate-checked. Granted, the instrument had been stored in a soft shell case, to which many would say the guitar had it coming at that point. But after years of traveling, it was never an issue until now.
“Definitely at least partially my fault to not have had it better protected, but this hadn’t been an issue for the past 3 years until my latest delta flight…” the passenger sighed in their r/Wellthatsucks post. The reason they didn’t have a hard case was that they preferred to carry around their guitar in a soft shell for the backpack feel of it. However, the Delta Air Lines flight crew told them to have it gate-checked instead, a fatal decision for the poor instrument.
Anyone who’s traveled by flight probably knows how roughly airline workers will toss around their luggage, especially when they cram baggage into a plane’s cargo hold. Anything not carefully wrapped or protected will likely be damaged or worse, broken. But still, for the amount people pay for airplane tickets these days, this sort of subpar cargo service should not be the case, yet Delta staff clearly couldn’t care less about whether a passenger’s treasured guitar was safely stored away.
While multiple people in OP’s post did share their condolences for the guitar’s tragic fate, the grand majority did scold the passenger for not using a hard case. “Flying with a soft case on an acoustic is absolutely wild,” remarked one commenter. “That seems intentional,” added another. “Right? i get that it was likely to break but this looks like the staff wanted to use my guitar as a sledgehammer,” OP laughed in reply.
In the end, a harsh lesson was learned: never pack a guitar in a soft shell case when traveling by plane. A harsher lesson would be that airlines do not care about whether your luggage is smashed apart or broken, as long as it reaches its destination.
