It still costs fuel to carry the weight and slows down the boarding/un-boarding process. Especially if overhead bins fill up and bags need to be, chaotically, checked in at the gate since then you also need more gate attendants. Some passengers don't need anything more than the personal under seat bag for their trip.
So charging for carry on bags is a logical approach if you wish to minimize the operating costs of the airline which budget airlines do.
Planes are typically used for longer trips though, not for getting an ice-cream from the stand around the corner. It is reasonable to expect some baggage allowance, the whole trip rarely makes sense without it. Charging for carry-on bags is almost like charging you for the air you breathe. It is abusive, because it's basically lying about the real cost of the ticket.
I haven't checked a bag or brought a non personal item carry on in 8 years. You can easily fit 4 sets of clothes, a jacket, etc.
>It is abusive, because it's basically lying about the real cost of the ticket.
In the US every airline that does this makes it comically clear. Spirit, the one people always make fun of for nickel and diming, has multiple screens before you book telling you that it'll cost extra for bags. Every other airline does similar.
Yes queue the 'but I have 9 children' posts, obviously then you need to pay a bag fee.
RyanAir most does fairly short trips (1-2 hours), and tons of people do weekend returns and such. You don't need checked baggage for anything less than a week.
I've seen tons of people with 3 bags, huge bags, and things like that. Frustratingly, this mostly affects people like me who don't do that, because I'll be the one asked to put my relatively small backpack under the seat because they're out of space, and being close to 2 metres it's not like I have tons of space to start with. Never too happy about that.
I haven't flown in a while, but generally RyanAir has been pretty relaxed about this, probably because it's just not worth the hassle and all of that. But seriously, fuck these people and fuck their fucking bags and I don't blame RyanAir for placing some incentives to stop the excesses.
> It still costs fuel to carry the weight and slows down the boarding/un-boarding process.
This is true but if we want to play the pure fairness game should someone who is 150 pounds pay less than someone who is 200 pounds? What about a 90 pound kid? These are drastic differences in weight and all 3 humans would likely fit in the dimensions of 1 standard economy seat.
Arbitrarily charging upwards of $200 USD to check a bag at the gate because your carry on personal item was 0.5 pounds too heavy doesn't seem reasonable. A lot of consumer grade scales aren't even accurate to half a pound, you may have done the work to measure it and be wrong because you don't have a high precision scale that's as accurate as the industrial scale at the airport.
My understand of the 1960's Spanish law which applies here is that the volume of luggage that is accepted as carry-on is fixed by the aircraft manufacturer (e.g. size of the overhead bins), and not the airline: the airline cannot arbitrarily decide the max volume of carry-on that passengers are allowed to bring (and worse, cannot selectively enforce a different limit for different passengers).
I can clearly see the slippery slope if rules like this were not be enforced.
In my experience the overhead bins are never large enough to accommodate everyone having the allowed sized carry on luggage. Which leads to bags getting gate checked fairly often.
