Brendon Treanor

Paid for checking your bags? Airlines are encouraging your rage.

Submitted by brendon on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 01:41.

From a corporate airline's front office come magnificent ideas to increase their companies net value. Making customers pay to check bags is a great idea for the corporation, and here's why.

Checking a bag used to be the way people would send home Christmas gifts. College students would check monstrous bags full of filthy laundry. Bands could travel. Everyone took advantage of this courtesy mostly because they got used to its luxury. This caused the airlines to employ more people at the gates to deplane the luggage, drive those golf cart baggage trucks, and operate the conveyor belts.

In a corporate office metropolis, an old timer named Fred thought of a great idea.
"I'll charge 'em for checkin' bags. Fifteen bucks a pop!"
"But won't that increase the amount of overhead baggage within a plane's cabin?" inquired his co-workers.
"Sure will, the planes will be so full of Santa's goodies, bail out money, sub prime mortgages, business attire, grammammy's cookies that they'll have to check bags even if they wanted to bring it on board."

Obviously this was a no-brainer for this office. The situation would pay for itself naturally. Why worry about the effects of goodwill loses when you can just make more per customer?

The reason why lies within the heart of every American. Everyone wants a safe country, but we need to be able to live comfortably in it. With the increased security details in every airport in America, people have slowed to a crawl to get through security. This was before the airlines started charging people to check bags.

Question: Have you ever waltzed through an airport with nothing so much as a passport or wallet on you?

Now that people have realized the outrageous costs of flying are only increasing, they have decided that they would rather attempt to carry their luggage on board than check bags. So where do you hide the contraband if you have to go through security? You have to go through the airport, and you can't place things within the luggage department. This places a tremendous strain on the security check points. Perhaps they should increase the amount of investment for the internal security team (staff, retrain, restructure) while decreasing the investment in outdoor luggage resources by an equivalent amount.

The result would open up traffic lanes through security check points and expeditiously magnify the customers perception of the airport. If customer spirits are high, they are more likely to rebuff the additional cost in favor of walking, with their bags in tow, through the airport.

However, my theory to be proven is;
Airlines may make more money per passenger by decreasing customer satisfaction.

Man wouldn't that be depressing? People are so stressed out already, but increasing their discomfort could actually provoke additional passenger participation in the paid bag check system.

If the airlines keep the lines long, people frustrated, and airports inefficient, they could persuade additional customers who "just don't want to deal with it" to check their bags. It's much less of a hassle to check your bags, so if the airlines are increasing you frustration level, would you be willing to pay $15 to alleviate a little bit of it?