On Monday night I was booked on an Easyjet flight from Belfast to London, and then another from London to Tallinn on Tuesday morning. Inbetween times I had arranged to stay with MWK. As my new life has encouraged me to massively trim back on the amount of stuff I own, I decided to arrive not just with gifts for his children, and some Finnish liquorice pipes and Moomin lollipops, but also a whole bunch of crazy books that I thought needed a better home than just a charity shop.
I realised that if was going to be able to deliver everything I wanted, I’d be over my luggage allowance, so I decided to be pro-active and book an extra stowed bag via the Easyjet website.
Suitably pre-arranged, I arrived at Belfast Airport to discover that my 42kg wasn’t just a little over my 2 x 20kg limit (but hey, no big deal, I can put a few extra things in my hand luggage if they’re really going to be picky), but a lot over my 1 x 20kg limit.
It took me a while to work out what they were saying, as it just sounded so completely insane. Even after the ensuing fight with the check-in attendant, I had to go confirm it with their ticket desk, as it couldn’t possibly be true.
But, indeed, scarily it is.
If you pre-book extra bags (the website helpfully allows you to purchase room for between 1 and 8 extra), you are indeed allowed to check in extra bags. But … you can’t actually put anything in them!
Well, that’s not technically true. You can move some of the stuff that would otherwise have been in your first bag into them, but you can’t put anything extra into them. Your weight allowance remains fixed at 20kg. Anything above that is still charged at £5/kg.
So, if you had gone on a huge spending spree and availed of their generous “8 extra bags” offer, the only thing you’re really buying is the ability to ensure that each bag has an average weight of no more than 2.2kg. If you actually arrived at the airport mistakenly thinking that you had bought an extra weight allowance, your now filled extra bags would cost you an extra £800.
The Easyjet staff were obnoxiously smug about this, in a “Wahey! We’ve caught out another idiot” way, explaining with glee that the website explains all this clearly.
I guess it does, if you make sure you read the small print, have a degree in advanced logic, and have a lawyer’s mind that knows that just because you’ve paid extra money for something, it doesn’t mean that what you’re going to get is what you actually wanted, and thought you were buying.
I get paid to program computers. I should have known better. But pick an average person on the street and try to explain the difference between “all bags must weigh less than 20kg” and “each bag must weigh less than 20kg”. I’m having a really hard time believing that Easyjet aren’t being deliberately obnoxious here, knowing that the vast majority of people will arrive at the airport and have no choice but to pay the extra fee.
But they’ve now joined KLM on my list of airlines never to fly on unless there’s absolutely no alternative.
in our return flight consolidage my computer bag into one of our two luggages, and throw away a computer if it causes excess weight. I could have bought a new computer with the totally unexpected penalty. My wife will pack her handbag with medications into one of the luggeges, as she was not allowed to carry it.
It happened to me the same :) 2 months ago from Gatwick to Athens !!!!!
@Nick (check-in) I cannot believe your attitude and mindboggling arrogance. “Please let’s remember if the staff look at you as if you’re an idiot it’s probably because you are”. Has it ever occurred to you that working in airline check-in might give you a better understanding of the ambiguous wording of your company’s booking information. Being able to think beyond the blithering obvious is something only intelligent people do and when you have ambiguity it is more confusing to intelligent people in fact as they can see the alternative meanings. I’m afraid your reply simply makes you look like one of the “idiots” you seem to despise and treat with contempt.
I dont care what anyone says, Call me an idiot i don’t give a monkeys, Easyjet deliberately offer added baggage on their site in the way they do to try and make Money, its that simple, i Added an extra bag thinking 20kg per bag, and ..yep only thing i added was Fuck all.. And to Nick (Check in) if your so fucking cleaver how come u work “check in” in an airport… enough said gob shite!
I would like to prepay my luggage for the flight as I already booked my flight. Is it cheaper to do on line. How do I go about finding this on line?
I have just been stung by this, having put my wife on a flight this morning. There were two of them flying and I paid for two extra bags (at just over £80) only to find out that because my wife’s two bags added up to 29Kg, I had to pay a 9 kilo excess (another £99), even though their combined weight was under the 40Kg allowance.
I have just got off the phone with customer services, having pointed out that nowhere in the booking process does it say “this must be no more than 20KG per person). It very clearly states “combined weight” in both the booking confirmation email AND the booking page on the website. The wording, verbatim, is:
4 Checked bags
per flight between all passengers combined up to a total combined weight of 40kg
Only on page 20 of the terms & conditions does it say that the limit is 20Kg per person.
I consider this mis-information, as the details in the booking confirmation directly contradict the wording in the terms & conditions and it is reasonable to assume that people would take the information they are directly sent in their booking confirmation email as being true.
That 9 kilos is going to cost me £99 each way – £198 in total, on top of the £80 odd I already had to pay to take 2 extra bags.
This is nothing short of deliberate confusion to extort extra fees from passengers.
To Nick the check-in guy – if 10% of your passengers fall for this trap, then it is clearly not obvious (bearing in mind that of the remaining 90%, the vast majority won’t be taking any excess baggage at all, so they should not be included in your calculations).
Your arrogance is both misplaced and insulting to those of us who tried our very best to play by Easyjet’s vastly over-complicated rules, only to get screwed over by a single line buried 20 pages into the terms & conditions (which is it widely acknowledged no one reads, or could be expected to read).