EU to ban carry-on baggage fees

Michael O'Leary actually explained this. They simply do not want people coming to the airport and having to print their boarding pass and want to incentivize people doing online checkin as much as possible. €55 is a rounding error to even Ryanair.

If you didn't do this; and it was say a more reasonable €5 - or even free, you'd get a lot of people coming to the airport without a boarding pass. This is actually super expensive to offer, because it's not the cost of staff itself, it's the fact you need to rent a desk off the airport, and it turns out airport desk space is _not_ cheap. Flights are often very peaky too, so you might need 5-10 check in desks to cover the morning rush, which are then empty for the next few hours. Or don't and you get hammered in the press for huge queues and people missing flights because it took an hour to print a boarding pass.

This EU legislation is also poorly thought through. As many have said I've often done same day or one night trips for work where I do not need anything past a backpack. Now a lot of people will take cabin baggage that could have otherwise took a rucksack, but the problem is a high density LCC airplane configuration does not have enough overhead luggage space for that. So now you need to check it in, which is expensive for the airline and time consuming for the passenger.

It would be far simpler for them to require flight fares/price comparison sites to include one piece of overhead cabin baggage in the cost, with a discount available (but no ability to advertise that price until late in checkout). This would allow comparisons to work properly across airlines, which is what I assume was the end goal here.

Either way it's not a big deal and I don't think should have been a priority for the EU.

It's been great for frequent travellers. Our cheap flights were subsidised by people who don't bother to follow basic instructions, or try to take the piss and take way too much on board hoping they wouldn't be caught.

If the charges didn't exist the cost would just be spread out across all travellers.

> Excellent news.

Terrible news. Flying is way too cheap as it is.

A lot of people use only that 7kg carry-on allowance to travel. 7kg can easily hold clothes, toiletries, laptop. Most of the time you can carry a personal item (purse/laptop) in addition to your main bag.

Thing is, the majority of people pay for a carry on allowance or checked-in luggage, so this rule isn't going to make airlines cheaper. The ticket prices will just go up to match.

I assume the motivation is to rein in something seen as semi-deceitful advertising. If you're advertising a lower price because you're excluding the cost of something that much of the competition already has baked in, that you know a high percentage of your customers will end up paying for, who is that really benefiting?

A market isn't made more efficient by consumers having to do more research and homework around "what are the hidden fees that might surprise me?"

I haven't flow budget airlines in the EU but in the US the budget ones often end up more expensive for the average customer after re-adding all the fees. So it's not just "don't charge people who won't use it," it's "have leverage to charge more for it by making people only realize they have to pay for it later."

(Though to be completely honest, carry-on baggage has gone fairly nuts since airlines started charging for checked bags.)

Yes, in practice this increases price transparency. Imagine everything could be monetized. They could charge for access to the bathroom, or water. What is the minimum expectation of what is included in the price of a ticket?

That's what they are scaring everyone with:

> Europe's airline market is built on choice. Forcing a mandatory trolley bag strips passengers of that choice and obliges passengers to pay for services they may not want or need

In any case I'm for it, I'm sick of finding how much am I really paying after 10 minutes of form filling. Price comparators are absolutely useless since they don't include such basic fees like a small trolley.

No. That's not how pricing works. The price of a ticket might go up slightly, but it won't go up by the same amount as the fees cost.

This is due to supply and demand. Basically the price of something depends partly on how much people are willing to pay for it. On average, people don't value the extra cabin baggage at the price the airline charges, so they can't charge everyone that fee. It would be inefficient and they would lose money if they tried.

They might increase prices a little... But the most efficient price increase might be surprisingly small.

Is there a cost for it though? They don't carry cargo when someone chooses not to buy carry-on baggage right and they don't charge people per kg anyway.

It's not even like one of those tricks for upselling as for most people 0 baggage doesn't make sense and it turns into a hidden fee.

So I guess they will increase the prices of 20 + 40 tickets to 50 to compensate for all the lost cabin baggage sales and some people will be really upset that they can't have the 20 tickets anymore. Meanwhile people will be able to compare the full cost of their flight with the cost of a train or bus alternatives.

IMHO they should make it compulsory to display the minimum cost of transfer to the airport. Often those 9EUR Ryanair tickets actually cost 100EUR+ because they fly to airports that don't have reasonable transfer options and you pay multiples of your flight for transport to and from the airport.

When you put in all the costs you realize that 9EUR plane tickets is more expensive than 100EUR+ train ticket.

Presumably. They truly want to bill per kilo of baggage and passenger per ticket but they’d be sued into oblivion for that.

Yes, airfare will be slightly more spread across everyone who flies, vs everyone paying for this except those only traveling with a personal belonging.

At some point, you have to say no to further enshittification and price discrimination optimization.

Yes. At the same time though, the airline companies cannot infinitely increase prices.

I'm all against dark patterns, but how can you ban them?

Even after EU explicitly trying to curb dark patterns for website cookies, I can't recall having ever seen the "only functional cookies" option displayed in the same UI language as the "all cookies" option. The latter will always the one that is prominently highlighted.

there's unpleasant and there's legal scams.

also, look a bit further. they want to make rail competitive. here they're doing it in classic EU manner of raising the cost of competition instead of making rail more efficient (it is a nightmare to buy tickets for cross-border travel.)

> You can easily carry 2 weeks of clothes in a backpack.

As somebody who was recently 2 weeks abroad, no you can't. My backpack would have laptop, chargers and 2 weeks of underwear and would be full. Unless you are talking about some huge hiking style backpack, but that won't get into cabin because personal will force you to check it in.

Two weeks of clothes in a 40x30x15 backpack? Do you change once a week or what?