Bmibaby cages may cause storm for refunds             

9th September 2010

Bmi baby cages at 30 UK airports too small

Excess charges for hand and checked in luggage is something that has slipped into the overall cost of your airline ticket and has been no doubt been a nice little earner for the budget airlines.

It is rare now not to see some poor unfortunate sole opening a check in bag to transfer clothing to hand luggage or vice versa or even stuffing a plastic bag with clothes to leave at the airport to be picked up later or pay the dreaded excess charge.

These charges can be pretty hefty and a businessman was far from chuffed when travelling from East Midlands airport to Amsterdam to be charged £30 each way because although there was no weight problem, his bag did not fit into the cage designed specifically to ensure that measurements were not exceeded.

He was pretty adamant that the measurements of his bag were within the measurements laid down on the company web site and when he arrived in Amsterdam he tried the Bmibaby cage and low and behold no problem whatsoever.

Also the cages used at the departure gates had more rounded edges than used at check in and meant the fit was much tighter.

Bmibaby have admitted that the cages used at 30 UK airports do not conform to the measurements used on its web site and will replace the cages. I have no doubt Bmibaby will not want to draw too much attention to this and I ask anyone reading this article to twitter your friends.

At this moment, it is not clear how long these cages have been used or how many people have been falsely charged. If you have been charged, there is every likelihood that you would be entitled to a refund as it would be very difficult for them to prove the validity of their original charge when their own cage was at fault.