One of the most frequent complaints at the moment about low-cost airlines — and even some very high cost airlines nowadays as well, especially for flying across the pond — is the amount being charged for checked baggage, sometimes up to £16 for shorthaul flights within Europe.
Personally, I’ve always felt that it is much fairer to charge for baggage, rather than giving people who want to carry a lot more with them a free ride, but the flipside of this is that the legacy airlines which don’t charge for checked baggage can suddenly become much better value when compared with their rivals which do.
When baggage charges started at just a few pounds each way, the little bit extra didn’t make that much difference, but £16 doubled could make a seemingly expensive £100 flight with an airline like British Airways, which would also include free food and drink, become much better value than a £70 return flight with Easyjet, and this is before you add in the cost of getting to and from a more remote airport like Stansted or Luton.
However, these extra luggage charges really do just reinforce the argument in favour of travelling light, not to mention making sure that you do know how much you are carrying before you leave. For this, we would have to recommend buying some form of travel scale — I have a simple lightweight analogue scale, made by Gotravel products, and available in the travel department of many major stores.
Here are a few personal tips for travelling light:
- Clothes — how many do you really need? Hotel laundry might still be ridiculously expensive, but you would probably be better off by washing your clothes halfway through a holiday at a local launderette, rather than paying for extra baggage charges. It’s always worth taking some clothing to cater for sudden changes in the weather, but if you are packing tight, isn’t it better to wear that raincoat through the airport, rather than having to take an extra checked bag?
- Camera — I used to travel with a large SLR where I went, sometimes complete with long zoom lenses, but now I just take a compact digital camera. Where are your pictures likely to end up? If they are only going to be shared with friends on the Internet, resolution is never really going to be that important, so a decent compact digital camera should give you the versatility you need, especially if you can find a model with a high enough ISO for flexibility when taking photos at night. even if you do plan to print your images, aspect ratio (print shops still default at 3:2) might be a more important consideration than megapixels, as a standard 6×4″ print at 300 dpi will need just 2 megapixels (1800×1200px).
- Laptop — are you travelling for business or pleasure? If the former, then lightweight models can certainly save considerable extra hassle, and if the latter, then I hope you can just ditch the laptop and enjoy yourself! Same goes for PDAs etc, but if you must get yourself connected, you can always use a hotel business centre or Internet cafe.
- Adapters and chargers — I used to take a whole load of different power adapters, especially to go with my laptop on camera, but as their technology has improved, most portable devices will go for several days now without being charged. Many hotels will have chargers for standard mobile phones behind the reception desk. Can you get by with just taking a spare battery?
- Buying stuff on the way — buying souvenirs and other products might be part of a travel experience, but they could end up by lumping you with a whole load of extra charges to get home. Always bear in mind that if your goal is hand luggage only, you won’t be able to take any liquids over 125 mL through security, so it is best not to even look at those cheap wines and spirits. With the buying power of modern supermarkets, not to mention online, can you actually get the product you are looking at back home anyway? Work out the difference in price, and the cost of getting it home, and make your own decision. If you’re getting someone a gift, it might well be cheaper to post it direct from wherever you are — this will save you lugging it around all day anyway. Using the postal system might also be a way of avoiding checked baggage charges for your own stuff – so if you want a little bit more space in your bag for non-liquid gifts, why not leave the task of taking your dirty laundry home to the Postal Service?
If you do find yourself scrunching everything down just to fit in one bag to get through the airport, you might want to take a foldable backpack so that you can put your coat in it once you have reached your sunny destination.
