How to hack your flight luggage allowance
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What's the first thing you think of when you hear 23 kilos? For me, it's how heavy my check-in luggage can be without getting an extra charge. I do kind of freak out about the weight of my luggage, no matter how much I pack, whether I'm taking a huge check-in bag or a small wheelie bag or a tiny under-seat cabin bag, and it's

And it seems like I'm not the only one. There are so many videos on TikTok showing you how to pack and we have recreated them for you. They sound a bit like this. This is how I learned to fit a week's worth of luggage into a bag small enough that you can carry it on the plane and avoid the cost of extra baggage. Here's everything I packed for my trip to Finland. Bro, have you been packing your suitcases wrong your whole life? Because I have. And these are

extra charges are big business. Last year, passengers spent $150 billion globally on things like seat selection and baggage fees. So how do airlines get away with charging us so much for these extras? And can you avoid them? That is what you're going to hear about today on What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm your host, Hannah Gilbert.

Let's find out more about this now from BBC reporter Sam Gruy. Hi, Sam. Hi, Hannah. How are you doing? Good, thank you. So what is the situation with luggage fees? Do all airlines charge them? Well, if you've been on a flight in the past couple of years, you'll probably know that charges for luggage are pretty commonplace wherever you go in the world, whoever you fly with. There are some exceptions to that. There are airlines that will allow you to bring on a checked bag with no extra charge or a cabin bag.

But, you know, it's become in recent years, the norm has really been to charge for for extras. And this kind of stems back to the rise of budget airlines in the noughties. And you had a period of deregulation in the airline industry before that, starting in America. It used to be that there was really strict rules. There was a kind of cartel of.

airlines who had kind of control of the market and there weren't lots of different airlines offering cheaper fees, which is what happened when deregulation came in across the world. You know, in the UK and Europe, the likes of Ryanair and EasyJet in Asia,

AirAsia and Indigo. And what that did was it introduced much more price competition for ticket prices across the board. And that obviously had a kind of knock-on effect where airlines were now

charging less for tickets and there was a much more competitive market, prices were starting to come down. But they're obviously thinking, well, we need to increase our profits in other ways. So was born the extra bag charge. Deregulation essentially means that every airline can use its own rules. And there are so many different rules when it comes to luggage. And I have been stung. I've been burnt by this before. Yeah.

I mean, we all have. And there's nothing worse than when you get to the checking desk at the airport and you put your luggage on the scale and you're...

0.2 kilograms over and you're having to rummage in your case and put on an extra jumper or even if you take your cabin luggage which is now commonplace to an airport and put it in one of the big luggage sizes and it doesn't quite fit and you're having to unpack stuff I shame to say that that has happened to me quite recently and I ended up wearing sort of a pair of headphones and an extra jumper and you know it's not what you want at an airport. It's so humiliating isn't it just

Opening your case up in front of everyone and they're like, come on, come on, I want to board the plane. And you're like, oh, I just need to take one more jumper out. I know. And the thing is, it didn't used to be like this. It used to be the case where you'd buy an airline ticket and the cost of luggage was included in that. You'd get a meal, you'd get a drink and there weren't the same restrictions.

stringent weight limits on luggage that we have now. But things have changed and that's the case for flying today.

It's not just you and me, Sam, who have been burnt by this. Passengers are also pretty outraged by some of these so-called hidden costs. We're going to hear from some of them now. This is Lauren, who had to pay for her bags on a flight from Boston to Toronto. It's ridiculous. It's way too much money. Yeah, it feels like a trick because it's like you buy the ticket, you think it's going to be less expensive than you have to pay for it.

have to pay like 200 extra dollars to just bring your bag with you. And here's another passenger, Sage. I think that it can be a little bit pricey, especially if you're exceeding a certain weight. I know I've like dealt with that when I went traveling internationally. I was in Peru earlier this year and my friend's bag was over $200 coming back because of the weight limits. So Sam, they can be quite extortionate as we've heard. How do airlines justify these costs?

So I guess the justification for them is that they're offering a broad range of fees to a broad range of customers. Not every customer is going to want to take on a 25 kilogram bit of luggage. Say if they're just going for a weekend away, they might want a small amount of luggage. They might want no luggage at all and they might want to be really cost savvy and pay as little as possible to

So they say that they're kind of appealing to lots of different customers and that these fees are kind of advertised up front and people opt into which sort of luggage extra they want. And, you know, that's the same for seat selection too. You know, some people who are taller might want extra leg room. Some people might want an aisle seat versus a middle seat. So this is given sort of, this has spawned this industry where there's a lot more choice, but you, of course, you have to pay

to pay for that choice. It's interesting to note there has been some pushback, not just from flyers and passengers, but from countries and governments around the world. There's a row brewing in Europe at the moment over whether several airlines should charge for cabin luggage. We had in the US at the end of last year, in the US Senate, politicians were grilling airline bosses over fees,

basically saying they were unfair and that if you travel on a holiday via an airplane, you don't really have a choice on whether you need to bring your luggage or not. You have to bring your stuff with you and it's unfair. And some of these fees have even been called junk fees, which are kind of the fees that aren't advertised up front in the original cost of the ticket. I mean, airlines, obviously, they argue against that and they say that they're offering a service here. So it's quite an interesting balance, really.

And you have been speaking to the boss of India's biggest airline. What did he have to say about these extra costs? Yeah, so Peter Elbers, who's the boss of Indigo, he used to run Dutch airline KLM. So, you know, it's fair to say he knows the industry well. He's been in it for a long time. What was interesting about India's industry and India's air travel market was that

it's not quite as developed as some other places in the rest of the world, namely the US and Europe. You know, India is more of an emerging economy. It's got a big growing middle class, you know, previously who wouldn't have had access to air travel and who now increasingly have got access to air travel and have got the money to fly. So India's market is probably a few years behind the US and Europe where these fees

these extra fees have really become commonplace. Peter Elbers, the boss of Indigo, was saying there's a real benefit to this. So they don't charge for a checked bag. It's included up to 15 kilograms. But what he says is the result of that is that you get airplanes taking off and landing really quickly because you haven't got the situation, which, Hannah, I'm sure you've experienced where you're on an airplane and there's

30 people waiting to get off in front of you. Everyone's individually taking their own bag down. You know, you're just, you don't know where to sit. You don't know where to stand. You're waiting to get off the plane. Peter Elbers argues that by including luggage in the fee, you don't have this problem. There are also loads of influencers making content about how to hack your luggage allowance.

Why is this kind of content doing so well? Well, this content is really, really booming online. We got in touch with TikTok, who told us that posts with the hashtag luggage have increased in volume by 135% this year. And hashtag packing now has more than a million posts across the platform. That's growing every day. And I think it just taps into a couple of main things, really. One that, you know,

none of us like the anxiety factor of going to the airport and thinking oh a bank's going to be overweight we're going to have to take a load of stuff out and put it on or pay a huge fine well exactly and that's the other thing we are we're savvy we like saving money we like a good deal and no one wants to be stung at the checkout so I think it does tap into into those two things um and

Kelsey Dickinson, who is the content creator that I've been speaking to, she goes by the name of Cheap Holiday Expert. She's grown an audience of nearly a million people across her platforms offering travel hacks. And she says one of the biggest, if not the biggest thing that's grown her audience is offering savvy tips on how to get around some of these baggage fees.

I feel like I've kind of made it my life's work to try and find all the hacks possible for avoiding paying baggage fees. And this includes things such as buying a fishing vest and using all the pockets in that to be my bag instead. That actually worked for me and did really, really well. So that would be a top tip from me. I've even packed my neck pillow full of pants on the way out rather than having to pay extra for a bag. ♪

Are you allowed to have an additional neck pillow that doesn't fit in your bag? Well, I think about when people fly, you know, they'll take a neck pillow with them and it's totally allowed because, you know, people have neck problems and people want to sleep on flights. So, yeah, rather than bringing one stuffed with sort of feathers, you could...

stuff it fully your clothes is as is one option another option another suggestion I had was that if you go to duty free and you buy something from duty free they'll give you an extra carrier bag which you're allowed to take on the flight you know what's to stop you putting a few extra items in there this is genius I love all of these ideas I might have to go and get myself a fishing jacket although I don't think it will look very stylish when I get there yeah probably uh practicality over style there Sam thank you so much

Thanks, Hannah. If you liked this episode, we have got loads of others talking about things like, are we getting more allergic to stuff? And who makes the clothes you buy on Shein? You can find those on YouTube, on the BBC World Service's YouTube channel, or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. That's it for today. Thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.