where does that figure come from?
> Extra luggage is more work for the airline
Extra pieces: maybe. Excess weight: nope.
I've been charged up to E100 for 3kg of luggage overweight (23kg allowed, my suitcase had 26kg). That didn't make sense to me when I looked at the guy behind me in the queue, who easily had 40kg more than me on his hips.
It's the pricing structure that is completely out of proportion and that needs to be brought back to something reasonable.
Really? It's the first two lines of my comment, specifically spaced out to make it clearer.
As for the other issue, excess weight is easy to convince the public about, especially now that they're doing more of the 'please standardise your luggage' where individual pieces also get weight limits (as you found).
Does the student have to pay more money at the gate in order to return home? If that student does not have the money, does the student have to leave luggage behind in order to make up for the weight? Will that be bad publicity for the airline?
Or the other way: suppose someone has a round-trip ticket from Australia to Maine to fulfill a dream of hiking part of the Appalachian trail. During the hike, that person loses 20 pounds. Does the airline reimburse the person for lost weight? And if so, is it in dollars or euro? If not, is this rightly seen as a penny grabbing method by the airliners?
If someone buys three bottles of wine at duty free (about 12 pounds) before flying back to Australia, will the gate agent charge them for the extra weight?
All-in-all, it seems like a bad idea for the airlines, and for relatively little money per flight.
Not a good idea at all
This right here. Also, storage space for cargo is quite limited and packed full in comparison to the space used in the passenger cabin and you can easily and more safely accommodate 35kilos more "meat bags" than a couple of 35 kilo big, heavy suitcase that don't fit under the seat or into the overheads.
Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons.
That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less than 10% of it spent on shifting your meat.
Extra luggage is more work for the airline - handlers, check-in staff, tracking, lost baggage recovery. It also means much longer queues resulting in poorer service for everyone. Extra meat weight is a trivial amount of work for the airline to deal with - it moves itself around and consumes the same resources as the 'little people'.