Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
A normal, shaped hard case is small enough to take onboard - even if they take it from you and put it in the forward hold, which will be done by one of the cabin crew and is always at cabin pressure. In this case, the owner wanted to take it with him and was even willing to pay for an extra seat (which TSA rules allow for), but was refused.
Rules vary.
We recently flew Easyjet from London to Alicante. Anything you took on board with you had to fit inside a template/box that they had at the check in. If you had two bags then they both had to fit in the box together at the same time. If a bag had wheels on it then "it would fit in if the wheels weren't on it" was not considered an excuse. If you had a bag and a laptop then the laptop had to go in the bag and THEN the bag had to go into their template box. Anything else HAD to go into the hold, and it was incumbent on you to have pre-booked your hold luggage. Not just the weight, but the number of items. If you booked 50Kg and 3 bags and arrived with 4 bags weighing 45Kgs in total then you had to pay for an extra bag (as this means their baggage handlers have to incur extra wear and tear on their bodies - I'm not kidding).
I can't recall the exact figures but when you pre-booked it was something like 2 euros per Kg and 5 euros per item, but if you hadn't pre-booked, or had to book more at the airport then it was something like 5 euros per Kg, 10 euros per item and a flat fee for the inconvenience you were causing.
OK... sure... it's a money making scam as most people will pre-book a bit extra just to be safe, but anybody turning up with a guitar was going to have a hard time. The staff were very good at saying "no, sir" with a big cheesy grin on their faces.
One positive result of this fascist approach was that everybody got luggage rack room over their actual seats.
Mind you, this is one of those budget airlines where all you get for free is a place to sit (there was no pre-booked seating - though I believe that is going to be introduced - but you could pay 5 pounds extra to get "priority boarding", IE a license to push in at the front of the queue) and use of the loo. I took my own sarmies on board (inside my bag, as it was placed in their little measuring box).
