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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

My last four flights have each made me gate-check my carry-on at the jetway.

They could've saved a lot of time and labor by just letting me check it like I would have before they started charging $30-50 each way for it.

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That is the most counter-intuitive thing for me while flying. Why make me pay to check my bag? Make people pay to carry on a bag. Most of the time boarding and leaving a plane is taken up with people dealing with overhead bags. Checking a bag should be the cheapest option to incentivize people to be more efficient.

If checking the bag is free, everyone would do it, leaving the overhead space empty. That overhead space is flying to the destination anyway, so it’s better to make sure it’s full. The. If there’s free space in the hold underneath, they can transport other things like cargo (which makes them money).

> If checking the bag is free, everyone would do it, leaving the overhead space empty.

Checking the bag used to be free, and this was not the case.

My best guess is that at least some airports will charge the airlines per checked in bag. Thus to save money if possible people carrying them inside is most profitable.

But then air companies will have to hire more workers to move luggage.

Most flights on busy, small planes, where most passengers are wheeling chunky rollboards up, will offer complementary gate check for larger carry on bags. Often you can actually check such a bag for free at the bag check counter before security - even if your ticket does not include any checked baggage.

Yes, I know, that's what I described. So why not a fee for carry-on - the actual limited resource on such a plane - and a free small checked bag to be efficiently and cheaply shepherded from the entrance all the way to the destination by staff and machines specialized to that?

This also allows me to actually plan for what I need on the plane versus what I don't, instead of an at-gate shuffle of medications and charger blocks from one bag to another.

My point is that that is the service you are getting from regional/express airlines these days. Some of them offer ‘personal item only’ basic tickets which means ‘carry ons’ are extra; and de facto ’carry ons’ are actually checked bags, because everyone knows they are going to offer complementary gate check – and it turns out you can in fact often just check the bag for free at check in. And of course this allows you to pack things in that bag that can go in the hold, but that you wouldn’t be allowed to take through security, like standard size toiletry bottles.

What’s weird is, I agree, the way it’s described and marketed. Carry on add-ons should be sold as ‘small checked bag’. As it is, if you know your carry on is going to be gate checked it’s easy to plan where you pack your lithium battery devices; if you don’t you’ll be doing the gate check shuffle.

> My point is that that is the service you are getting from regional/express airlines these days.

But it's unnecessarily implemented in a costly, inefficient, annoying way that makes the entire experience worse to no one's benefit.

See original post, I guess?

A lot of the constraints in how airlines can market service levels are imposed by the ticketing aggregation standards and how fares show up in searches. There are also issues with creating differences in luggage standards between regional and long haul flights because of through ticketing.

It’s probably more complicated than it looks from the outside, and all falls into the same problem of overall air travel inscrutability caused by the ‘it makes sense to the people who are in it but looks Byzantine from outside’ problems the original article here is complaining about.

I tend to doubt it's more complicated than it looks.

It's a way to make more money off people for worse service, with the externalities going on people who can't do anything about it.

Typically they allow you to check it in regularly on fully booked flights. The airlines even prefer it.

Source: I fly circa 50 times a year.

To me it implies that the $50 price for a checked bag is just free money to them, and that enough people end up using it anyway.

For people who travel for work, how often do you get a checked bag in your fare?

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