Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 27th of May and if you're in the UK, I hope you had an enjoyable bank holiday weekend.

I've spent quite a lot of it worrying about cabin baggage.

So you didn't have to.

Well, maybe you will have to.

Let me just talk through the sequence of events and then I'll bring you up to

date on what is happening this week. Airline baggage allowances have progressively shrunk over the past

couple of decades. The first airline to say, actually, we're going to start charging people

for bringing checked baggage onto our flights.

That was Flybee.

As a result of them charging for check baggage, guess what?

Many passengers decided, well, we'll just take hand luggage instead.

As other airlines, first Ryanair, then EasyJet,

now pretty much everybody moved to the idea of charging extra for checked baggage, so the problems for those taking cabin baggage have multiplied.

It's still the case that British Airways will allow you to take two cabin bags of really quite chunky size, one backpack, one roll-along case,

weighing 23 kilograms each. But most airlines are much less generous. The standard arrangement

now for a low-cost airline is to allow you to take one piece of cabin baggage, a small piece

for free, and they've all got slightly different rules. For example, if you look at EasyJet,

they've got some quite generous maximum dimensions for that single bag, a limit of about 32 litres, which should be quite enough for a

short break. But I surveyed 10 European airlines and found that the bag can't be bigger than 33 by 25

by 15 centimetres, which is a measly 8.25 litres to comply with the restrictions for every single airline.

The European Union thinks this isn't a good inconsistency to have, that it's unfair on consumers,

...