How often do you fly from SHA to PEK? How often have you been denied checked luggage @30 mins?

The “carry-on crisis” is a topic limited to SHA-PEK, or is the above a reference of trying to replicate China everywhere outside of China that there are flights?

I want to semi-redact that post. It's true that people do carry-on bags for SHA-PEK (it's a nonstop flight and we never have big bags). This doesn't cause a great deal of crisis during boarding/deplaning because we are talking about 2-3 day trips (similar to your BOS-DCA trips). But, let's say you are flying BOS-DTW-PDX...you're taking two flights and would therefore need to clog up the departure process twice. Furthermore, you would need to drag your bag from one gate to another at DTW. Check the bag at BOS and you will be better off!

I don’t fly in China anymore, but I know there are airport and airline efficiencies in some places that just don’t work out in many other places in this era — especially where the TSA is meddling with checked luggage at home, pushing to make sure more meddling happens abroad too, and airlines and airports have gone as cheap as possible on ground handling without becoming an absolute up-front embarrassment more broadly visible.

Connecting flights with checked luggage increase opportunities for mishandled checked luggage more than non-stop flights. And even with non-stop flights from DCA, checked in luggage no longer flies as well for me as it used to in the 1990s and until into the fourth quarter of 2001.

For most of my flights, I’m generally entitled to free checked luggage and often more free checked luggage than 20-30 years ago. And yet I am generally less eager to check in my cabin baggage nowadays than ever before.

I experienced this two times last year. In both cases, I went to CVS and Walmart, Sure, that was annoying, but I got the bags the following day.

I would much rather sit and relax in a comfortable airline seat for thirty minutes, perhaps browsing the in-flight magazine, than jostle elbow-to-elbow standing around a crowded baggage carousel with aggressive retrievers and unskilled luggage cart pushers for half an hour! :eek:

You are confusing the allowed weight without any charges and maximum weight of one piece of checked luggage. The 23kgs or some even 20kgs may be the free allowance. 32 kgs is what the maximum weight of one piece of checked luggage. This is IATA regulation. No one piece can be more than 32kgs. That is what is required in carry on as well.

Education and enforcement works well. When the itinerary is ticketed, an email should be sent (or if buying "in person", a cheat sheet instead) that details space concerns. A reminder at 48 hours and at checkin, you could attest. One thing that they have to note in this cheatsheet is that it also includes duty-free packages.If you show up at the gate with too many bags or really oversized ones, then you're asked to step aside and figure it out.

Once on board, they could run intermittent reminders on how to load the overhead bins. Every flight I have taken in the past, the overhead has been improperly loaded and most people don't care. I load my backpack (I don't use those mini-spinners) on it's side, bottom in. Most people coming in just put in their carryons sideways. You'd be surprised how much additional space can be found if people learn to load the compartment. You might get a few objections once in a while, but whatever. Most will understand when you explain it to them. If they don't like it, they can complain to the cabin crew.

That's the untold beauty of long immigration queues ... your bag will likely be making its 20th revolution around the belt by the time you're through.;)

As for domestic (anywhere) flights, I'm less convinced about checking luggage. If it's an LCC, I'm probably checking something anyway, usually souvenirs.

But, I will admit that in the hundreds of flights in which I checked bags, there have been a few (as to be expected) issues:

- Soon after 9/11, I forgot about the fact that all international flights bound for the U.S. had to have luggage re-checked. As it turns out, that instance of ignorance saved me some guff, as the carrier delivered it to my door.
- Cathay Pacific left my bag back in Hong Kong, so upon arriving in Jakarta, they gave me some rupiah. Two days later, the bag was at my hotel (mind you, this was in 2005).
- Japan Airlines damaged a bag, so after filling out a form at Tokyo Narita, they gave me yen.
- Most recently, Flynas (Saudi LCC) forgot to place a bag on the connecting flight. I picked it up at Dubai when checking-in for my next flight.

As for solving the overhead crisis, sardonic me says get rid of overhead space altogether.

I saw your post this morning and had to think about it. My initial inclination was to advise you to hang out in a restaurant for 30 minutes before heading to baggage claim, but then it occurred to me that your bag could possibly be stolen from many US airports.

So, I will now concede that if you have a non-stop flight to PDX, HBO is probably the best strategy.

I do a lot of connecting international flights and I always make sure that at the Gate they confirm to me that my bags are loaded. It is a lot easier to do that on at most Asian and Mid Eastern flights before they start boarding. By that time they have been loaded into the containers at least. Furthermore some International airlines send you notifications when your bags are loaded ( scanned ) I also use airtags.
The carry on is a different issue. I have no issues with checking my suitcase(s). But on a long international flight I need to carry some items with me too. Then Duty free is there for the airports to make revenue. If there is no DF sales, they would simply increase the landing and parking and jetty charges and the airlines would simply increase their fares.
What gets my goat is when people carry on board suitcase sized back packs and a smaller back pack and their laptop type carry on. If the airlines decide this is the only max size they would allow and enforce it then this issue would disappear.

I've flown twice from DSM to ORD with my granddaughters; the first time we stopped at a Subway before picking up our checked bags and the second I had lounge access so we stopped for a snack. Both times staff had retrieved the bag from the carousel and put it in a storage room so we had to do a little work to get it back but I appreciated it. Nothing worth stealing- my laptop and the essential blankies and stuffed animals were in carry-ons, but since the hotel pool is a big deal we may have had to go shopping for bathing suits!

Since SHA-PEK was referenced... I've only flown that route once, and the unique characteristic I recall is that it was an A300 and when it was time to board, they just said, basically, "everybody board". We had assigned seats and got to our seats quickly enough to stow an overhead bag, but the entire boarding process was chaotic and towards the end of boarding people were stowing bags in bins nowhere near their seats. Airline was China Eastern, which I think is Skyteam (?), but there was no concept of preboarding Skyteam elites or even calling out anything about Skyteam. (Didn't matter to me....that's the one alliance I've never had status with.)

So I guess I can see "carry on crisis" being a topic there, although it really seems more like "boarding process chaos". This was about 10-12 years ago so perhaps things have changed for the better by now.

My other trip on that route was via train, which was super chill and comfortable.

If you flew on an A300, that was before the "modern era". Now, almost all of these flights have dedicated (express) check-in, close-in gates, and ATC priority (e.g. the PLA no longer messes with this route, so flying is almost always much faster door-to-door than HSR). Actual boarding experiences can vary, but IME, it's rarely as bad as you've described. Furthermore, I make it a practice to board last.