mkmurrays

Apologies if this has been covered before - don't think so though, did do a quick search.
New baggage policy announced by BA from 13th Feb - pay through the nose if you check in more than one bag.... See link below....
http://www.britishairways.com/travel...k/public/en_gb

Lionel_in_Ontario

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6341129.stm

"BA said that flights to the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico would be exempt from the new charges to bring policy "in line with the local government regulations"

printer

Typical, more money for the passengers to fork out.

Mind you it's still allowing 2 bags per person for Canada flights so that's ok.

mkmurrays

Good news for when we move to Canada, but just another complication if you are travelling elsewhere.....don't fancy stuffing everything into one bag and struggling to lift it...

Lionel_in_Ontario

You have to understand where BA are coming from on this...

Any given aircraft can only weigh so much. A LOT of revenue is generated from cargo in the hold. If everybody decides to check in 2-3 heavy bags then space and weight goes down, they have to ditch the cargo = loss in revenue, more weight = more fuel.

It's unfortunate that many migrants will be victims of this, but carrying things with you isn't really meant as an alternative to crating all your belongings up and having it shipped over. I'm always shocked at some people who show up at the airport with two or three trolleys heaving with cases for two people!

As someone who only has been stung once for excess baggage (on Zoom, who I have heard have a zero-tolerance policy on this and make a large chunk of money from it), i'm still looking to see if people who weigh twice what I do will be charged double.
Or, better still as not to offend people, give me money back

mkmurrays

I understand the numbers on these things, and I'm the first one to travel light. What grieves me is how BA seems to stumble from one PR nightmare to another.......or is it me?

Lionel_in_Ontario

They certainly don't seem to be able to put the same spin on it as a low-cost airline would!

I'm not sure exactly what the deal is, but whenever anything even slighly negative comes out about BA, the media are always quick to give it huge coverage and have on-line discussions along the lines of "BA - are they shit or what?"

I don't remember the last time I saw a positive news article about them. I guess the journos are frequent travellers (via the armpit that is LHR too), so have some kind of vendetta from a bad experience a few years back.

printer

I can tell you that the low cost Irish airline Ryan Air are also very strict on excess baggage, have been caught a number of times when using them for cheap business flights.
The one thing that bugs me is that there seem to be no "hard and fast" rules.
Going out from Stansted the check in staff might say nothing at all, yet coming back from Cork for example with exactly the same bags and i get stung. To make matters worse i could take 10kgs as hand luggage free but cannot use this allowance for checked bags if i have no hand luggage.

neill

BA won't change their North America policy because then they really will loose all their customers.

It's crap but in someways i think it's fairer, and at least the money is going back into the airline, and not straight to UK govt PLC.