While traveling this weekend, I started thinking why airlines don’t charge for carry-on luggage instead of checked baggage. Carry-on baggage imposes much more burden in various areas of the travel process, and it makes sense to incentivize people NOT to carry on their bags.
First of all, I believe carrying on your bag provides more value than checking your bag, and it makes sense to charge people for what provides the most value. Checking your bag allows you to save time, because you don’t have to go to baggage claim and wait for your bag to be unloaded. Checking your bag also virtually negates the chances of your bag being lost or delayed by the airline.
The downsides of carrying on are that you have to get your bag through security and drag it everywhere with you. By incentivizing people to carry-on their bags, the airliens are exacerbating these downsides. More people now try to bring a full stuff bag with everything they need through security checkpoints, which adds time and hassle in the security checkpoint screening process. Also, as people try to board, they have to figure out where to put these bags, block the boarding process while they try to fit their oversized bags into the luggage bins, and invariably, space always runs out on full flights.
Basically, incentivizing people to bring overstuffed carry-ons is a drag on the whole process, and it’d be better if more bags were checked at the counter. When the liquid ban first went into affect, and no liquids were allowed on board at all, I remember reading articles about how flight attendants were relieved at how much less carry-on baggage there was. We could partially restore this state by charging for carry-ons and allowing at least one free checked bag.
Of course there should be some exemptions. People traveling with children (particularly infants) have to carry some items, as well as those with medical needs/medication. One way might be to still allow one free “personal item” or perhaps just allow only one carry-on, be it a personal item or carry-on bag. And of course, there should be some exemption for elite members, as there is with checked baggage currently.
The other side of this issue is enforceability. How would airlines be able to make sure people actaully pay for carry-ons? Actually, in the rest of the world, especially with discount airlines, most of them do charge for all your carry-on or checked bags, depending on their weight. Airlines and TSA would have to find some way of tagging things to indicate that they have been cleared for carry-on, that isn’t too easy to scam.
Overall, I think the benefits of figuring out a way of charging for checked baggage instead of carry-on would be beneficial for the travel experience. Listen up airlines!