FORUM

A good friend of mine has told me that at Gerona they now prohibit you from taking your bag back off the scale once you have put it on, if its over, and swapping your stuff with someone else you are travelling with, or giving it to someone that is not travelling. Apparently there were people shouting and wailing all over the place and they had to call security. There were long lines of drink, towels and other goods simply left behind as the people in the queue gradually realised what was happening and did not have the money to pay - they just started taking non-essential stuff out in case their bags were over.

They just charge you or you don't travel, or you leave your bag behind.

I think this is terrible - it should be possible to weigh your bag BEFORE you put it on their scales - we always weigh our cases at home but they are never calibrated the same as the airport's.

We are so fed up that we just take the 10k hand baggage now and don't bother checking anything in. If it doesn't go in the bag it doesn't go.

Julie,
There is normally a unused check in at GRO, between flights use that if your worried.

I flew back from Girona several weeks ago. Chatting with a woman next to me in the queue, she told me that they now prevented people from being able to weigh their luggage on vacant check-in desks. And sure enough, when the staff arrived to open up the check-in desk it looked as if they activated the weigh part with some kind of keycard.

The woman had always checked the weight of her baggage in this way before and was furious that it wasn't possible anymore. However, she then spied a little stall in the middle of the departures area where you could pay a guy to wrap up your luggage to protect it from being damaged in transit. And guess what? He had a set of scales!! So she hot-footed over there, got her bag weighed, 'changed her mind' about having it wrapped and came back to the queue!

Helen is absolutely right. The authorities at GRO seem to have a "zero tolerance" policy re baggage weight these days. As they do at Stansted. But at Perpignan things sem to be a lot more free and easy.

So,it's difficult to say whether this is an edict from the airports ,or from Ryanair HO.

As the 10kg rule is set by RyanAir (and not the CAA etc) then I feel the airline must be behind it. I believe EasyJet allows any "reasonable" weight for handluggage (as long as it's not over-sized).
I don't suppose it's a coincidence that the enforcement of the rules got much tighter the same week that a dip in RyanAir's profits were announced.

I too usually weigh my bags on an emplty checkout. The last time I traveled from gerona was at christmas and asked a few dest staff who were just closing if I could just pop my bag on the Scales, not just Ryanair checkouts either. As someone has already said I think these are now activated on opening/closure of the checkin desk. The answer was no.
I do not have scales at home So have gotten quite good over the years at guessing my handluggage, appart from the fact that my rucksack would burst if i put any more in it and usually take the same holdhall so same there.....but last time Outie had used my bag and took it in the car........My bag was huge, but only had our same clothing in.....one smug guy in the next queue took great joy in telling me that he could tell by the size of my bag that I would be over the hold limit.....how wrong can you get , it came to less than 10kilos

I have come across this problem of weighing baggage before. so, I bought some portable fishing scales off ebay for £9 and I weigh my bags with that (I just carry it in my pocket!) - this way we can ensure that all of our bags are the right weight (to the max) and make an informed decision if there is anything to be taken out.

If you travel with hand baggage only, and do a Web check-in, you bypass the check-in desk completely and go straight to security. So who measures the 10kg limit?

Nobody weighed my small suitcase which I had for hand luggage a couple of weeks ago at Girona. It did fit the size criteria and I had weighed it at home - it was about 9 kg.

If your hand luggage is not weighed at Girona that's fine. However, the jobsworths at Stansted weigh hand luggage.

I would urge those who can afford it and get to it easily, to use Southampton airport for the Flybe flights to Perpignan when they are running. It is such a different experience there.

I also use Bristol (for Toulouse or Béziers) ..

They don't weigh hand baggage, my hand baggage weighed 13.5 kg. This is silly as our suitcase weighed 21 and we got charged for the extra kilo. This was at Manchester. I had one set of paperwork from BMI which said there was no limit on weight in the hand baggage as long as you could lift it into the overhead locker. The next set of paperwork said 10 kg limit on hand baggage.

Rose wrote:If your hand luggage is not weighed at Girona that's fine. However, the jobsworths at Stansted weigh hand luggage.

But to be Fair to STN if you are overweight there you must be mad.

They have the re-packing area just before the Security, with scales and thousands of free plastic bags which keep all my screws separate in my Workshop.

Before they started the restriction on Hand Baggage and liquids, most people travelling to the UK, from Mainland Europe myself included used to take a 5 or 10L bidon of wine, nowadays there's none.