The battle of the bags
30.01.2025 - 09:35
/ insider.com
There's a certain level of zen that comes with boarding an airplane. The free-for-all may be stressful, but the chaos is also predictable. If you fly often enough, you can see from a mile away how the process is going to go — especially when it comes to the battle of the bags.
It typically starts with an unenthused agent issuing what seems like a far-too-early warning that overhead bin space is running out, causing a swarm of anxious passengers to crowd the gate in an attempt to ensure their bag travels with them. Some passengers voluntarily hand over their luggage for a gate check, begrudgingly strapping on that dreaded red tag, while others hold out, betting that there's more room on the plane than the staff is letting on. If they're right and they make it past the gate agent, all's well that ends well. For those that play it wrong, well, they're in for a kerfuffle — the last-ditch attempt to squeeze the bag in, the plea with a flight attendant to come up with a fix, and, ultimately, the decision to relent. The flight eventually takes off, often delayed, with everyone slightly more annoyed than they were 30 minutes ago.
The hubbub around luggage is the "single driver of boarding time," said Samuel Engel, a lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and a senior vice president at ICF, a consulting firm. "If you look at what is the constraint on boarding time, the element that really squeezes it is the overhead bins. It's not people finding their seats."
Given how recurrent this problem is, it seems like someone should have fixed it by now. But instead, the handling of carry-on luggage has become an inevitable pain point in flying. The airlines have made checking bags an unappealing proposition, given the cost and the risk of items being mishandled, meaning more people are trying to cram their possessions into increasingly packed planes. And while carriers try to squeeze every last dollar out of baggage, the rest of us are pitted against each other — passenger versus passenger, staff versus passenger, lenient gate agents versus strict flight attendants — which makes the flying experience just a little more miserable. Passengers have to take a "Jesus take the roller-bag wheels" approach to the situation.
A lot of people are flying nowadays. The Federal Aviation Administration handled 16.4 million flights in fiscal 2023, with an average of 2.9 million passengers flying in and out of US airports every day.
Planes are more crowded, too. The annual load factor, meaning the percentage of seats actually filled by a passenger, is over 80%. Department of Transportation data provided by Airlines for America, which represents major airlines in the US, indicates that on the average domestic US