Why only one piece of hand luggage?

This week I travelled on the low-cost airlines Ryanair and EasyJet. I assume that most of you have heard of these no-frills companies that make their money from anything but the flight fare itself. To avoid having to pay the hefty baggage fees, we all have to make do with the 10 kilo hand luggage that we are entitled to. This didn’t use to be an major problem as your 10 kilo will see you trough a long weekend but in order to, I can only assume, make even more money, these companies decided that these 10 kg could had to be contained in one single bag.

So, rather than having one bag with about 10 kg and then a laptop bag, a hand bag and the duty free bag, they now want us to fit all that into the one single bag. A nearly impossible task. I tell you, there were many travellers with open bags trying to re-pack and reshuffle their items. I wonder what the duty free shops think about this? Especially with us buying less than before as it is with the recession.

I often buy a drink and a book to enjoy on the plane. I used to have it in a separate little bag so that I could easily place my luggage in the overhead locker and then sit down and let the rest of the passengers find their seats. But not this time. Now I had to fit that into my already overcrowded bag and once in the plane, I then had to open the bag and search for the items that I wanted. That took a while and the queue got longer and longer as more people had to do the same. I wonder what Ryanair and Easyjet accomplished here. Any thoughts?

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