I love summer travel!! Not this year though, I just found out that I am going to be charged $15 per bag when we go to New Orleans at the end of June. Thank you American Airlines!
In an effort to cut losses due to increased oil prices, airline companies are coming up with all sorts of new fees to charge their customers. A few weeks ago, most airlines decided they will charge customers $25 per second bag checked in for domestic flights. Yesterday, American Airlines decided to charge $15 even for the first bag checked in.
I don’t even want to think what this is going to do for the fight for overhead compartment storage. It will be ridiculous! I can picture fighting to be the first one to board and trying to cram their overstuffed bags in the tiny space because they don’t want to pay $15 to check the bag. I can’t blame them, I don’t want to pay it either.
I don’t even want to think about what this is going to cost us. I can put all of our clothes in two bags. But we also have two car seats and the stroller. For carry-ons we have my pump, a laptop case and the diaper bag. Maybe we should stay home. Do you think taking a loss of $400 makes more sense? At least we would save any money we would have spent down there. But then we wouldn’t go to the place I have been really wanting to visit for some time.
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Stinkin’ airlines. I just flew via AirTran, and they don’t count carseats in your baggage limits.
Maybe American won’t count them, either.
Best wishes with all this!
That’s a tough decision! I don’t think prices to travel are going to get any cheaper though, so if you can swing the $400, I would go. It will probably cost much, much more than that later.
JMO though!
Hope you get it all sorted out. It stinks when things end up costing so much more than you expect.
OK, I reread your post and realized that the $400 you were talking about was not the increase in the travel costs. Sorry!
I still think you should go.
Hi Adrianne,
yes, we’ve already bought the tickets so the costs will be the cost of cancelling them which my husband corrected me and said it’s only $200. But he also said we are all going, he didn’t need to push too hard to convince me
Yeah, check on their policy with car seats and strollers. Usually you can take your stroller all the way to the plane and they will check it at the plane, so it wouldn’t be counted either. And when I have flown in the past with babies they allowed an extra bag for baby stuff at no fee. Not sure how they’ve changed that now. But, call ahead of time and find out the policy.
My opinion is to still go. Paying an extra $30 for bags sucks, but you will have a good time and it will be worth it.