Are airlines charging fees for the wrong bags?

While many travelers love summer vacations, most frequent travelers don’t love the summer airline boarding process. It may be because airlines charge for the wrong bags.

It’s not just that flights are full. Summer has a higher percentage of families and infrequent fliers. Not only are these passengers less familiar with traveling, but they are less likely to have the status with the airlines, or the credit card that allows them a free checked bag. Hence, they try to save money by carrying on more. Almost every flight ends up having issues for overhead bin space.

Sometimes gate agents help out by asking people in later boarding groups to check their bags. However, earlier-boarding passengers still clog the aisles going through the process of removing books, pillows, and so on, from those bags because they had to have their carry-ons down to two or fewer items.

There is a potential simple fix. Have airlines start charging coach passengers without status or branded credit cards not for the first checked bag, but for the first overhead bin bag.

Passengers could still bring a bag that would fit under their seat, and presumably bulkhead passengers would get an exemption for such an item. And, airlines might want to make exceptions for passengers traveling with young children for diaper bags, etc.

The change might be a little difficult to enforce at first, but not impossible. Airline agents could just hand out tags indicating payment had been made, or that a passenger had some reason to be exempt. The agents could give passengers the tags upon check in at the counter while they checked luggage, or at the gate for those who only had carry-on bags.

In addition, no doubt airlines could allow travelers to prepay carry-on fees and let travel agents collect the fees for them.

Now, a free checked bag would mean more passengers would have to show up at the airport earlier. And another benefit would mean that more checked bags would help the TSA security process go faster.

Plus, expediting the boarding process would mean getting more flights out on time. Who hasn’t been on a flight that could or should have been on time, but ended up delayed because of a slow boarding process and/or flight attendants and passengers going through the process of either trying to cram one more bag in, or having to remove bags to be gate checked.

Best of all for the airlines, the change would probably be revenue-neutral, as most passengers would probably bring the same amount of stuff, but just pay for a different bag. If travelers really cut down on their carry-ons, the resulting speedup in boarding might make up for the lost fees. Since, in the airline business, time really is money.

Previous

Next