Spain fines budget airlines €150M over 'abusive' cabin bag and seat charges

Spain could also look into fining all these scammy car rental agencies that operate at or near airport. They are totally abusive and should be not just fined but fined to death.<p>It&#x27;s these kind of things, as in TFA, that makes life miserable for tourists.

My very selfish reason for becoming pro cabin bag charges is how much quicker it has made boarding planes.<p>The way people took the piss with the bags they brought on board before was ridiculous and resulted in a big delay of people trying to find space for their oversized bags of stuff they absolutely don&#x27;t need for their weekend trip.

I just flew with Ryanair and yes, the fees for luggage etc are expensive, but if you don&#x27;t take luggage and any extras they offer, they are amazing value. I hope the cheap airlines don&#x27;t get overrun with fines because if not for them I&#x27;d barely see my parents.

I am slight surprised over this, but seems to follow what the US Does with these fines.<p>If it was up to me, all passengers for say the past 7 years will get a full refund of all their baggage fees + 100 EUR + 10% interest compounded per year.

I agree that the 20E charge to print a paper ticket seems excessive, but I&#x27;m not sure about the bag fees. I know it&#x27;s a bit annoying to get nickle and dimed for everything, but on the other hand it makes sense to only charge passengers for the services they need.

I&#x27;m surprised they didn&#x27;t mention TAP Air Portugal which routinely flies from Portugal to Spain using standard sized planes. They also have a number of international flights from the US to Portugal.<p>Their hand bag requirement is substantially smaller than most other airlines.<p>It&#x27;s 16&quot; x 12&quot; x 6&quot; (40cm x 30cm x 15cm) with a 4.4 lb (2 kg) max weight. That depth 6&quot; &#x2F; 15cm measurement is substantially smaller than most other airlines as well as the weight. Most other airlines have 2-3&quot; (~5cm) more in depth and allow triple the weight. It makes a noticeable difference if you plan a trip with 2 backpacks.<p>If you happen to need to check it at the gate, they charge $80-$220 USD depending on where you&#x27;re coming from and going to.

It would be much better if they just had a streamlined process for charging for larger bags at the airport, and if the fee were roughly the same whether done in advance or not.<p>As it stands, forgetting that Wizz Air requires bags 6cm smaller than easyJet and then getting told you can either pay more than your ticket cost originally or go home, but only sometimes if you get &quot;caught&quot;, is just a bit... I dunno, uncivilized, I guess?<p>If you make it say, £15 in advance, £20 at the airport, that is enough to encourage people to do it in advance as long as bags are all checked, you don&#x27;t need to be punitive.

I&#x27;ve flown a lot with Ryanair, Easyjet and Wizz Air, and apart from Wizz Air adding mysterious a &quot;System surcharge&quot; if you use an ad blocker (although I think they&#x27;ve stopped doing this), I don&#x27;t mind the extra charges at all.<p>Surely if they ban cabin bag and seat charges, then the base fare is just going to go up for everyone?<p>Memes and jokes aside, I actually find Ryanair to be a better service a lot of the time compared to Easyjet and more transparent with pricing, even though Easyjet is almost always more expensive on the routes I fly.

&gt; The government investigation also looked at concerns around a lack of transparency by the airlines over the final price of services when booking online, and the decision to block cash payments at the airport for additional services.<p>I just went through this a week ago and I was shocked RyanAir was doing this as I was sure this was not legal in the EU.

This would be a good moment to raise the taxes for airlines to have it aligned with rail travel. Demand goes down and they will adjust their additional charges.

If all the countries in EU did that, it would matter. Now it is just a drop in a bucket.

The taxes are &#x27;abusive&#x27; because they are sometimes very carefully &quot;hidden&quot;. Ryan Air is wonderful compared to the nightmare called WizzAir.<p>The issues with WizzAir:<p>-Administrative fees of 9 Euro on each flight, for each passenger.<p>-Trolley bag (10 kg) an extra of around 60 Euros.<p>-Want have the same fare for 48 hours? Pay an extra 12 Euros.<p>-After that, checked in bag, is around 40 Euros per flight.<p>-Check in at the airport costs around 40 Euros.<p>-Online check in costs 5 Euros, and the say they mail you the tickets two days before.<p>-They don&#x27;t mail you the tickets and they don&#x27;t say anywhere you can only print the tickets on the same day of the flight (atrocious if the flight is at 6 am).<p>-You can get a refund for a cancelled flight, but the refund link cannot be found on their site. You have a post on Trip Advisor that points to that site.<p>-If you have paid for a small check in bag (10 kg) but bring that bag to the plane that&#x27;s an extra 58 Euros (I can live with that).<p>-The boarding queue may stop for around 15 minutes, because a client needs to pay 58+58 Euros and the boarding attendant is unable to calculate such a complicated mathematical operation, needing the intervention of another boarding attendant (busy). That is a big no NO!<p>-Of course the web site has &quot;bugs&quot; and you may encounter &quot;issues&quot; that may force you to restart your session, specifically when asking for a refund...<p>-The &quot;bugs&quot; do not depend on the browser, or the OS (tested on Windows, OSX and Linux).