My family recently had our vacation as part of our rhythm of rest and I wanted to share some tips from our flight experience that will be helpful to you as well. Here’s a few baggage hacks to help make your next flight more smooth!
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1. Get a travel luggage scale
Airlines have baggage weight requirements and, unless you’re a very experienced traveler who can tell just by feel if a piece of luggage is over 50lb/22kg, you’ll need a way to weigh the baggage. Unfortunately, bags rarely fit or balance on a bathroom scale so you have to resort to the crazy but somehow “standard” method of weighing yourself, weighing yourself while holding the luggage (over your head?) and then subtracting your weight from your weight with the luggage.
But as Brian Regan famously and hilariously showed, that’s just crazy—and, more than that, inaccurate, and probably impossible on your return trip anyway since most hotels don’t have bathroom scales. Unfortunately, due to the purchase of souvenirs and the law of expanding luggage,1 your luggage on the return trip is more likely to be overweight. Making the problem worse, that’s also the time when you’re less likely to have a scale with you.
So buy a travel-sized luggage scale. These small handheld scales attach to your suitcase handle and measure the weight as the luggage hangs. They’re small and light so you can slip them in your suitcase and always have a scale.
2. Plan what you’ll rearrange
Unfortunately, even if you weigh your luggage in advance, you might still have a hassle if the airport’s scale is calibrated differently than yours. It’s a pain in the neck when a bag is overweight and you have to move a few pounds to another suitcase—rifle through your suitcase to find 1.3 pounds while everyone in line stares daggers at you and looks at your dirt laundry. Yeah, not fun.
Better yet: prepare a few things that are dense, easily accessible, and for which you know the weight. Super easy to make a switch—no underwear exposure required.
3. Go over the weight limit
This might sound funny, but I typically *intentionally go over the weight limit for my baggage. Airlines have margin around their weight limit; if their limit is 50 pounds, they usually won’t make a stink if your bag is 51 pounds. After lots of trial and error, I found that US-flagged carriers typically won’t make you re-pack unless you are more than 3 pounds over the limit. On the other hand, my experience with Asian carriers is that they’re more strict, rarely allowing more than 1 kg over the weight limit.
Three pounds may not sound like much, but when you check 2 bags apiece on an international flight and have a family of 4, that’s 24 pounds or half a suitcase of extra stuff you can ship for free. Just make sure to follow tip #2 so that, if you do have to repack, you can easily rearrange things.
4. Use your baby exemptions
If you have a baby, most airlines will let you check a car seat, stroller, and/or infant bed for free, which is wonderful. Airlines don’t care if the stroller’s empty space is stuffed with diapers, if the infant bed has an extra blanket smushed inside, or if the car seat is full of baby clothes
Maximize your allowance by buying a car seat bag or a stroller bag. Not only will it keep your car seat or stroller clean, but you can fill the empty space inside with tons of other stuff, giving you almost another checked bag for free. I only pack mine with baby-related things in case someone checks, but we’ve never had someone check in over 9 years of doing this. Once an agent asked what was in it, but when I responded “diapers” she didn’t even ask to see.
5. Maximize your carryon capacity
With the exception of budget airlines, US-flagged carriers rarely, if ever, weigh carryon bags or personal items,2 which makes your carryon bag a good place for small, dense items like books. I’ve traveled internationally with a 60 pound carryon bag plus a 30-pound backpack and no one batted an eye, so long as I was on US-flagged airlines.
On the other hand, Asian airlines in my experience are the worst for weighing carryon bags and being ridiculously strict about them, so I do not recommend this advice unless you’re on a US-flagged carrier with no transfers. If an Asian carrier, strictly keep to the carryon limit.3
6. Carry a bag-inside-a-bag
If you have a large and full carryon and personal item, it’s hard to get them to fit under the seat in front of you, and even more annoying to get things out of them on the flight. So what I do, instead, is to pack a small bag inside the larger bag which contains what I want to use on the plane. Then the carryon and backpack go in the overhead compartment and the small bag goes under the seat in front of me. Easy-peasy.
7. Make sure nothing is lost
My Grandpa worked in the airline industry for over 20 years and he would tell the craziest stories about lost luggage. While the airlines do a great job of trying to identify lost luggage, if your information isn’t on the bag or inside it, there’s not much they can do. My grandpa thus insisted that we travel with our contact information on the outside and inside of our suitcases.
Rather than those flimsy paper tags the airlines give you, buy some nice, sturdy, luggage tags so that you don’t have to constantly write your information down and so they don’t get torn off. Also consider getting a distinctive color tag so you can find your bags easier at the baggage claim.
I recommend travel tags that have privacy protection; these show your name easily so staff can check the bag, but in order to see the rest of your information, someone would have to unscrew or remove the tag, which helps protect your privacy.
So there you go! Some quick tips to make your airplane baggage experience better.
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Footnotes:
- Codified by my Grandpa, who worked 20+ years at the airline: The law of expanding luggage states that luggage on your return flight expands to take up more space than when you left, even if all the items are the same. ↩︎
- In fact, United Airline’s baggage policy doesn’t even list a weight limit for carryon bags, only a size limit. When I called to confirm whether or not there was a weight limit, they said they didn’t have a weight limit. ↩︎
- My worst travel experience happened when I switched from a US-flagged carrier to a Chinese-flagged airline (looking at you, Air China!) I knew there could potentially be a difference in baggage policies, so I called both United AND Air China in advance and both told me that the policy that would apply to me is United’s policy. Yet, when I got off the United flight and transferred onto Air China, they not only weighed my bags but charged me ridiculous “over weight” fees ($700+). I fought for an hour about them not following their own policy to abide by United’s baggage policy as the first leg of the itinerary, all to no avail. ↩︎