Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 29th of January.

So many stories around this week, but one that's really captured a lot of attention, I think,

is the story that Britain's biggest budget airline EasyJet has been told to stop claiming

that carry-on baggage fees are available from £5.99. The advertising standards authority

has ruled that passengers would, reasonably enough, assume they had a fairly good chance of paying under six pounds to take a large

piece of cabin baggage on board and the claim on the easy jet website was flagged to the advertising

watchdog by the consumer group which and they have been told, you've got to change that.

And so they have.

But I wanted to talk about how we got where we are.

And, well, basically in the olden days until about 20 years ago,

everyone's air ticket included a large piece of checked luggage.

Then the budget airline started bringing in charges for

putting bags in the hold. Guess what? Everyone brought their possessions into the

aircraft cabin, queue quite a lot of chaos and waiting around while people's

oversized bags were put in the hold and so on. It is all very tedious.

And so some years ago, the three big budget airlines, that's EasyJet, Ryanair and Whizzair,

sharply reduced the sizes of the bags that can be brought into the aircraft cabin without

paying any extra. And that also meant they could monetise

the roll-along cases so many people travel with easyjet said yep the overhead locker space is limited

so customers can't always be certain they'll have their cabin bag with them the new policy

will reduce queue times during

boarding and other associated delays and so will lead to improve punctuality. Well, except that

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