Travel question of the day: Simon Calder on Flybe’s cabin baggage allowance

Have a travel question that needs answering? Ask our expert Simon Calder

Flybe allows passengers to carry an additional item of hand luggage

Q It's the 55x35x20cm cabin baggage quandary. How pedantic are Flybe? Would 55x40x23cm kill it?

Simon Warsap

A Each airline is free to set its size limits for cabin baggage, and boy do they vary. The most generous you will find is 56x45x25cm, for example on British Airways and easyJet. That may look similar to Flybe’s, but when you look at the overall volume, BA and easyJet offer 64 per cent more space. The case you would like to use is just 3cm deeper and 5cm broader, but it takes up 15 per cent more volume. So I think the airline would take issue. Flybe, like other airlines, wants to be customer friendly – but the slim fuselage on their Dash-8 aircraft means they can’t be as generous as on bigger Airbus and Boeing jets.

It may be, of course, that no-one notices at the gate, and you can cram the case into an overhead locker. But personally I wouldn’t take the risk of paying £50 “for any oversized bag checked in at the departure gate”, as Flybe warns. Instead, I would look at splitting my baggage – Flybe allows “one additional item of under seat cabin baggage, such as a laptop or handbag”.

Every day, our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet@simoncalder