Hi OP,

If I understand you correctly, I think you have raised a few points and I apologise if I have misunderstood, please do correct me if so:

1) “What is wrong with EK?” - Compared to other carriers, why does EK, which markets itself as a premium network carrier with a “better” offering, have perceivably inferior cabin baggage rules.
2) You have had so many flights and this is the first time you have had to check a bag because you have been stopped for having overweight cabin baggage
3) You suspect this might be a way to get passengers to buy more shopping as people have to check their carry-on and so now have more free space to buy
4) Why weight over size - you have never seen a bag fall out of an overhead bin so the weight of individual bags inside bins should be irrelevant. Passengers are be expected to be able to carry them themselves so that negates the idea that cabin crew might be injured by helping with unknown bag size weights in the course of work
5) EK has one of the highest checked luggage limits in the industry and so it’s not a weight saving measure

I think that is mainly the gist of it?

I think we can look at it two ways, the safety/liability aspect of it and, I suspect the motivating aspect for EK, profitability. After that we can then compare their policy to that of other carriers, both network and budget.

Clearly it’s safer for crew and passengers if cabin baggage that’s stored in overhead bins is as light as possible. Whilst you may have never seen a bag fall out of a bin in your travels, I can assure you that it does happen and on a network with hundreds of flights of a day it happens relatively often. You can visit avherald.com for examples of injured passengers or crew due to turbulence. Things don’t just fall out of bins, sometimes people or carts crash into bins and things then bags fall out, creating a, err, knock on effect (I know, sorry, sorry). You can imagine the headlines of “passenger on Emirates flight in coma after being hit by suitcase falling out of bin”. Not worth it, I think. You’ve addressed the point about passengers having to be able to carry the bags themselves (viz. BA policy) so cabin crew injuries and minimised. I don’t think that would really work for EK though as in many of the cultural environments the airline operates in, that would be seen to be extremely poor customer service and as you have pointed out, EK markets itself as a quality carrier.

But I think in EK’s case it really comes down to matters of economics and profitability. You have an airline that makes a significant amount of revenue and even profit from Y class passengers who make long and infrequent but regular intercontinental trips. Migrant workers, students, etc. The 30kg allowance in Y I think is aimed to attract those passengers who usually do pack hold luggage as far as it will go. So, EK bump their allowances to 30/40/50, but the fares still need to be competitive with carriers that offer lower allowances and we all know the primary cost in the airline industry is jet fuel, usage of which is directly correlated with aircraft weight. Airlines need to have precise and extremely controlled fuelling or they simply go out of business.

From flight dispatcher/load controller point of view, they will see that they have a Y pax, who needs to have 30kg of baggage space reserved, 7kg for cabin baggage and then make allowance for additional weight e.g. shopping in duty free, whose items you will note are not usually that heavy, and for safety and for the lax enforcement of cabin weight rules as all of us here have most likely benefitted from. Say that’s 50kg per Y pax. Now increase the cabin baggage allowance from 7 to 14 to 20 and the increased allowance you have to make for safety margins and you can see that you’ve increased fuel cost per Y passenger by 20-40%, an actual cost because the fuelling has to be done in advance to passengers and cargo checking in. And of course because to be on the safe side you always have to assume that the full allowances are used. You wouldn’t want the plane going to reserve fuel!

So in reply to your point about weight saving, I would argue that there is checked baggage space that is fuelled and paid for in the price - EK has every incentive to make sure it is actually filled with cargo because more fuel you put in a plane the heavier it gets and it costs more to run the flight as the fuel has to carry its own weight as it were. Where passengers don’t pay directly for reserved weight is in cabin baggage - and that’s where any sensible revenue person would want to reduce costs by reserving less weight for cabin baggage.

I also mentioned that having more bags in a cabin slows down the boarding process in aggregate and that reduces an airframe’s profitability by introducing the risk of delays (expensive!) and in general reducing utilisation as cabin crew may need to find more bins, there are queues to get on the plane etc. I think the costs that introduce are not as much compared to the fuel savings though.

I think the incentive for duty free probably doesn’t come into the equation - it’s ancillary and nice for the group but for the airline, it needs to run like clockwork with low fuel costs before all else.

So, what’s EK’s problem - as other posters have already commented, many other large network carriers similar in size and offering to EK have similar policies. You mentioned Doha and I assume QF, which also has the same policy of 1 item of max 7kg. A comparison to Ryanair and Air Asia as you have made I don’t think is accurate - those carriers are budget, mainly short haul operations. They exist on airport fee share and low fares - all checked luggage is paid for and I suspect both operators would love to get rid of hold baggage altogether as the logistical cost of baggage operations probably makes their baggage revenue not as profitable as ancillary revenue like F&B. O’Leary is on record for wanting this. The point being that mainline network carriers reserve 20/30/40kg++ of space in their holds in the ticket price and pay for it to be fuelled just in case you use it. A budget airline makes you pay before, so their fuel costs are always covered by you, or if you arrive at the airport and check the bag in without telling them in advance, you pay a punitive rate. It's not an unreasonable EK-only policy, especially considering which of their competitors (i.e. most of them) have a similar policy - I'd argue there's nothing wrong with EK specifically, but a feature of many many network carriers, some of which you yourself have flown.

I sympathise with you that you have been on many flights before OP where your cabin baggage was allowed through no problem; I myself have packed the same as you onto many EK flights and have not been stopped. But the rules are clear and I think it would be churlish of me to complain that they can’t break the very clear rules that they have just because on many other occasions I have got away with it. There are similar policies on other airlines, but I get the impression that EK is singled out for criticism here because they are the only ones that have actually enforced their own rules on occasion...