“My jaw dropped when it was like, ‘And you’re going to have to pay $100 per bag,’” said the Tampa Bay law professor and author of the upcoming book “Corporatocracy.” Her reaction: “Well, screw it because once you add in the price of the seat and the price of your baggage, it’s the same high price as the price I was trying to avoid with like United and Delta and American.”
As Torres-Spelliscy discovered, adding a bag to your flight can dramatically increase the cost — and the cost can be a question mark until just before the airline asks for your credit card. While some companies have uniform bag fees, most embrace some sort of variation, whether it’s a discount of $5 for booking in advance or factors that only the carrier’s algorithm understands.
“It’s a nightmare,” said Kyle Potter, executive editor of the website Thrifty Traveler. “This is quite literally my full-time job and I’m constantly looking at our own stories that we’ve written about increases to bag fees. Is it still $30, but that one’s $40 but $35 if you pay online in advance?”
Bag-fee calculus
Figuring out how much your checked or carry-on luggage will cost on some airlines can seem like solving those algebra word problems you thought you’d never use: When are you flying? What’s the route? When will you pay? Enter it all in the calculator — or check an increasingly complicated section of the website — to find out.
On JetBlue, for example, bags cost more during peak travel times, and when purchased within 24 hours of a flight. Budget airlines including Spirit and Frontier have bag fee calculators — Spirit’s is the “Bag-O-Tron” — that spit out the cost for checked and carry-on bags after travelers enter their route and dates of travel. And even major airlines including American and United charge less when travelers pay online or in advance. Southwest remains an outlier, allowing a carry-on and two checked bags for free.
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