You’re allowed to carry bags onto the plane – but only if there’s enough space on board. Frequently if you don’t board early, there’s no bin space left.
The airline makes you give up your carry-on and check it.
Airlines have been installing larger overhead bins, not so much for customer convenience (people hate having to check a carry-on bag when they’ve chosen to bring it on) but for their own – gate-checking bags takes time in the precious minutes prior to departure, and risks causing a flight to leave a few minutes late.
That’s also why airlines force passengers to start checking their carry-on bags too early, when there’s plenty of bin space left.
This is one of the two biggest complaints across airlines on social media (along with damaged bags).
It is less of a problem on Southwest Airlines, since they don’t charge for up to two checked bags and passengers therefore try to bring less into the cabin.
Unfortunately larger bins aren’t a panacea. Even where bins are in theory large enough to accommodate a full sized carry on bag per passenger, that requires turning carry on bags on their side, and too many passengers don’t know to do this.
Now, United Airlines has a solution. They’re trying to teach passengers how to use overhead bins properly, to get the most bags in.
United has actually been doing this for awhile – at least a year – but customers are seeing this much more often now.
That’s because they send this boarding message to passengers on planes with their new ‘United NEXT’ interior that have these larger bins and it’s only recently that there’s a critical mass of these planes in the fleet.
There’s another trick to know, that airlines don’t tell you. These bins get heavy, since they’re stuffed with twice as many bags!
However, with many of the newer bins you can actually pull down the bin rather than just pushing it straight up.
It will help you raise it up with an assist mechanism. Although apparently that mechanism sometimes does break.
