Name: Oversized cabin bags.
Age: Venerable – but prior to the advent of airline cabins, they were simply known as “bags”.
Appearance: For our purposes, anything larger than 40cm by 30cm by 20cm.
How am I supposed to know if my bag is bigger than that? Shove it in that cage by the gate desk at the airport – if it doesn’t fit, you must submit.
Submit to what? Paying up to a £75 levy.
It does fit, except for the wheels. Surely the wheels don’t count? The wheels count.
But it’s also sort of tapered at the top, which means the overall volume will be less than … I don’t make the rules, I’m afraid.
Who does? Ryanair does.
Ryanair – I might have known. The airline has been conducting a tireless crackdown on passengers who try to take bags larger than the stated maximum dimensions on to its aircraft for free.
How’s that going? Quite well, according to CEO Michael O’Leary, especially since it began paying airport ground staff a bounty of €2.50 (£2.20) for every oversized bag apprehended.
Doesn’t that encourage them to enforce the most draconian interpretation of the restrictions? It certainly does. As a result, the number of passengers with oversized bags has gone way down.
But isn’t it bad publicity? O’Leary would very much like you to know he doesn’t care. “I make absolutely no apology for it whatsoever,” he said when he decided to raise the bounty by a euro last year.
How can one truly define what is meant by “oversized”? That is a problem – other airlines have their own rules. EasyJet, for example, allows one free bag of a size up to 45cm by 36cm by 20cm.
Are Ryanair’s ungenerous dimensions designed to catch people out? Actually, they’re more generous than the EU’s minimum guaranteed free bag size introduced last summer: 40cm by 30cm by 15cm. In response, Ryanair increased its permitted volume by 20%, making it 33% greater than the EU minimum.
But my carry-on bag is still too big. Don’t worry – you can buy a Ryanair-compliant free cabin bag for £40 or £50.
Then it’s not really free any more, is it? Or you can just pay to have a larger bag in the cabin – from £12 to £36, depending on the route.
Thirty-six pounds is more than I paid for my seat! Again, I don’t make the rules.
I suppose we’ll have other things to worry about when all the jet fuel runs out this summer. That’s the spirit – embrace the bigger picture.
Do say: “If we want to challenge the restrictive and often capricious rules surrounding cabin baggage, further industry regulation is necessary.”
Don’t say: “40 by 30 by 20? My dog is never gonna fit in that.”