At this point, when most major carriers in the U.S. have to be finding it increasingly hard to find new fees to charge their customers, one easy solution is to raise the fees they already charge.
Checked baggage fees have in general been slowly increasing since their inception, although elite-level fliers and certain credit card holders have been exempt, which must cut into projected airline profit on some level.
Unlike shipping companies, the airlines have so far used a flat fee system. The price to check a bag from New York to Washington, D.C., a distance of just over 200 miles, is the same as to check a bag from Boston to San Francisco, a distance of over 2,700 miles.
Now, Easyjet, a discount internet-only European carrier may be changing all that. According to the Mirror, a U.K. paper based in London, the airline is moving to a distance-based checked luggage fee system.
While the idea makes sense, it also seems likely that it will mean fee hikes for many travelers, especially British families heading to sunny vacation spots, such as Greece and Egypt.
It also seems likely, that if the new system works for Easyjet, that U.S. carriers and others will follow suit. Why charge $25 for a bag when you can, for example, double the price for a connecting flight? Or, triple it for a cross-country flight?
Other than customer goodwill, a criteria that doesn’t seem to be at the top of many airlines’ priority lists, the biggest problem I can see in implementing a pay-by-distance luggage fee structure is just time and potential delays at the airport.
Since online kiosks can already print boarding passes to a traveler’s final destination, it should be simple to calculate the mileage and thus a sliding-scale fee. But that doesn’t mean passengers will be ready to quickly accept the requested charge. (Even now, with the limited fee options for luggage, anyone who flies frequently has almost certainly been stuck in line behind someone either arguing the fee, or trying to repack their luggage to avoid it.)
As with most airline changes, the law of unintended consequences will almost certainly apply. For example, as mileage junkies know, with different connecting cities, two travelers can be going to the same destination, but fly a different number of miles. In addition, unless all carriers adopted the same fee structure, it could get complicated for passengers connecting between airlines.
What this will almost certainly come down to, however, is money. If airlines, like Easyjet, find the profit from the mileage-based baggage fees outweighs the hassle, others will soon follow. Perhaps, for many travelers, the simple $25 flat baggage fee may be added to the list of travel memories from the “good old days.”
Photo: wikipedia.com
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
