March 15th, 2010, 18 Comments »
Next week we’re heading to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for a week of relaxation and exploration. I’m thinking of getting some new luggage. For short trips I tend to use this roadster bag I got in Morocco. For longer trips, though, I use an increasingly worn backpack that I bought eight years ago in Ireland. As my father sometimes says, it doesn’t owe me anything.
I’d like to get something new, but I face a vexing luggage selection problem best articulated in a table:
|
Pros |
Cons |
| Backpack |
Keeps your hands free, and it’s easy to carry long distances. |
I always feel conspicuous wearing my ratty backpack into nice hotels. The older I get, the more conspicuous I feel. |
| Wheelie |
Robust, professional and easy to wield in airports. |
Pretty much useless outside of the smooth sidewalks of the western world. Awkward to carry. |
| Duffle bag |
More formal than the backpack, less formal than the wheelie. |
Looks kind of like a hockey bag. Not fun to carry over long distances. |
I know that the easy answer is “just man up and keep using the backpack”. But surely there are options I’m overlooking, aren’t there? And, no, I’m not going to buy any of that hard plastic luggage that everyone in Ireland seemed to own.
What are my other luggage options?
18 Comments »
April 27th, 2008, 10 Comments »
In yesterday’s Globe, I read an article about how Air Canada is now charging passengers $25 to check a second piece of luggage. This, of course, is the latest in a long series of indignities that travellers have had to suffer at the hands of the struggling airline.
I was amused by a sidebar accompanying the article (you can see it at the bottom of the online version) which discussed fees for various ‘premium’ services on Air Canada. Here’s what some of those numbers look like for a North American flight:
Check more than two bags: $100
Check two bags: $25
Check one bag: $0
Check zero bags: You save, get this, $3.
How baldfaced is that? Air Canada cites “record high and unrelenting fuel costs” for the new fee. If the price of fuel is driving this pricing, then shouldn’t one less bag be worth as much to the consumer as one more bag costs the airline?
And the third bag is even more ridiculous. I’d bet that processing subsequent bags doesn’t cost as much as the first. After all, the clerk is already processing one. The third bag shouldn’t cost three times the second, it should cost less than the second.
There’s also a $100 fee for overweight bags (from 23 to 32 kg). I should mention that 23 kg is a lot of bag. When we left to live abroad for a year, my huge backpack only weighed 17 kg.
I know the fees are aimed at discouraging travellers from bringing a lot of luggage, but that pricing seems hilariously audacious.
10 Comments »
