'Budget airlines like Ryanair weighed down by pricey new rules'

How many of us can still remember a time when airline passengers were allowed to check in a bag weighing up to 22kg free of charge into the hold? Anything heavier than that would be charged.

We were then allowed a carry-on bag that had to fit within given dimensions or else it, too, had to go in the hold. Some airlines have never been good at enforcing those dimensions and so you will occasionally get passengers staggering on board with a bag the size of a small piano – and somehow getting away with it.

While there will always be those who will try to abuse the system, the overall policy and practice historically worked well and at least you knew that the price you had paid for your ticket was as much as you would have to pay – unless your bags were too heavy, and that was easily checked on a set of bathroom scales before you left home.

But then along came our current range of so-called budget airlines who changed the standard policies we were used to in an attempt to… well, to be honest, I’ve never really understood what they were attempting to do.

Suddenly we were being discouraged from checking bags into the aircraft hold by being charged fees for doing so. Instead we were encouraged to take carry-on luggage on board – which coincided with the advent of flight-crew-type wheelie bags which fitted nicely into the overhead lockers.

At some point Ryanair in its wisdom increased the allowance to two carry-on bags and immediately problems arose. An overhead locker will just about hold one bag for each of the passengers sitting below it, but as soon as you allow each person to take on two bags, then World War Three breaks out as passengers find all the available baggage space has been taken by those who got on board first – a situation made even worse by those carrying small pianos.

The business policy of certain budget airlines seemed to be to milk their customers of every penny they could. You were not only restricted as to how much baggage you could take, but you had to pay for on-board catering or go without; and wasn’t it Ryanair in its wisdom that even considered charging passengers to use the toilets?

Now we have an announcement from that same airline that instead of being allowed to take two bags on board, the second bag will be checked into the hold free of charge.

They are also going to allow their passengers to check regular-size luggage into the hold once again – so we no longer have to survive a two-week holiday with only as many clothes as will fit into a flight bag. However, they will charge us for the privilege (we who have already paid to fly on the plane) – £25 for a 20kg limit.

That news was evidently designed to have us leaping up and down with joy and eternal gratitude to Ryanair, our saviour airline. Somehow I don’t think so. Yes, we’ll gladly take whatever crumbs fall from Michael O’Leary’s table, but isn’t he simply restoring some of the conditions he removed, which he seems to think we may have forgotten were once part of the cost of flying?

But Ryanair isn’t doing this entirely out of the goodness of their corporate heart. What they have eventually discovered – and it seems to have come as something of a surprise to them – is that, as mentioned, if every passenger takes two bags on board then there isn’t enough room in the overhead lockers and most bags won’t fit under the seats either.

This little-known (to Ryanair) fact, and the time it takes for passengers to occupy their seats having fought their way through the baggage space squabbles in the aisles, was delaying the departure of their flights.

So, according to Ryanair, these new policies will make things easier and more convenient for passengers and help their flights to depart on time. All well and good, but I’ve got news for Mr O’Leary – if they had left things alone in the first place these problems would never have arisen.

Charge passengers the cost of a ticket and no more. We will decide at the point of purchase whether we can find a better deal or not. Let us carry one regulation-size flight bag on board, but enforce the regulation.

Let us check into the hold whatever other bags we presumably need to have with us (otherwise we wouldn’t have them with us) and, if necessary, apply a realistic weight limit with a reasonable charge for anything over and above that limit.

And it would be nice to have refreshments of some sort – even animals in transit get that much.

Father Neil McNicholas is a priest in Yarm.