Anyone who has booked a flight online will know that being sure you have chosen the right luggage option is often a difficult and stressful process. Bag size and weight allowances vary across ticket types and from airline to airline. And what’s worse, navigating all this, consumers know that, any mistakes made could lead to eye-wateringly expensive extra costs at the airport.
Now, in a bid to end the agony, the European Commission is threatening the aviation sector with an imposed set of standard luggage rules, unless the industry puts in place a shared scale of luggage sizes itself.
Confusing and arbitrary luggage categories
The Commission’s demand that airlines collaborate on luggage standards, comes after a recent vote by the EU Parliament to end confusing and sometimes arbitrarily-applied luggage categories.
During that debate, the differences between airlines and use of hidden charges were argued to limit consumers’ ability to make a fair comparison between flights. In a clever move to get around the variety, the EU Parliament chose to class hand luggage as an “indispensable” item that could be carried on with no inconvenience to other passengers or compromise on safety. The “indispensable” tag prevents airlines from being able to charge for it.
Uncontroversial?
The Commission is initially pushing for voluntary industry agreement rather than an imposed set of rules, but it reserved the right to “step in” said Adina Vălean, the European Commissioner for Transport “if nothing happens in a reasonable amount of time”.
Just how soon the industry will act is in question though. Rules saying that hand luggage cannot be charged for have been in place since 2014 but are widely ignored, and it’s clear that the variety of definitions of hand luggage sizes promotes that situation.
Around 13 billion passenger journeys each year in the 🇪🇺 are covered by #EUPassengerRights. And we want to strengthen them.
— European Commission (@EU_Commission) November 29, 2023
Today, we propose measures to better protect passengers against disruptions during a journey, especially those involving different travel services ↓
If you ignore that financial disincentive against anyone cooperating, Vălean’s plea to airlines sounds remarkably simple and uncontroversial. “This information should be provided to the travellers from the very beginning,” she said, “to know exactly when you buy a ticket what you are actually buying and what kind of luggage you can bring either on board or in the haul?”
Making reimbursement easier?
In a further championing of passenger rights, the Commission also put forward a raft of legislation, most of it aimed at closing loopholes on the reimbursement of delayed or cancelled trips, especially those involving multiple types of transport and across borders. Other measures to simplify consumers’ lives include a proposed EU-wide form for customers to use when they request a reimbursement or compensation, and raising consumer awareness of their rights.
