Foreign Perspectives

I’m sure that there are lots of opinions on this one, but for me the most useful item of luggage that I have at the moment is something that I received as a Christmas present many years ago: a set of luggage scales.

Having these means that I’m never one of those people standing at the Ryanair checkin desk arguing that there’s no difference to the plane if there’s 9kg in carryon and 16kg in checked luggage or 10kg in carryon and 15kg in checked because I have already moved that 1kg from checked to carryon before I get to the desk. In fact with these scales we were able to manage 85kg and no excess fees on a recent trip (2 adults, 2 children can carry up to 100kg on Ryanair, not counting the pram). Without them, we’d have been sure to be arguing that we should be able to share the checked luggage allowance.

You might think that you will be able to check the weight using one of the unused checkin desks. However, in newer desks the scales are switched off when they aren’t being used and, of course, the staff won’t let you weigh luggage in advance at a desk with no queue as that will clearly reduce the income received through excess weight charges.

It’s definitely worth purchasing a set if you’ve not got them already as they’ll almost certainly save their cost on your first trip. Now, all you have to do is to hunt them out as I’ve not seen them for sale for quite a while.

Of course, their disappearance coinciding with the arrival of more aggressive excess charging is just a co-incidence. Isn’t it?  

One Response to “The most useful item of luggage”