How to Stay Under the Baggage Limit

The case counts

Checked baggage is weighed as it goes onto the belt, with the case included.

A hard-shell suitcase often weighs four or five kilograms empty. Against a 23 kg allowance that's a fifth of your capacity gone before a single item goes in — and it's the component people leave out of their mental arithmetic, because it doesn't feel like something you packed.

The rows are grouped rather than itemised on purpose — weighing forty individual things is a waste of an evening. Clothing and shoes are usually most of the bag; Toiletries are the group that grows without anyone noticing, because liquids are dense; Electronics and chargers are heavier than they feel once the laptop, the power brick and three cables are in. Weigh each pile together and enter one figure.

Share of the allowance spent on the empty case exists to make that visible. If you're regularly near the limit, a lighter case buys you two or three kilograms on every trip you ever take, usually for less than the cost of one excess-baggage charge. It's the cheapest kilogram available to most travellers.

Why it asks for your allowance

Because there isn't a number to assume.

Allowances are set per airline and vary by route, fare class, loyalty status, and whether the bag was added at booking or afterwards. They change without much notice. Even 23 kg — common on international economy tickets — is nowhere near universal.

Your booking confirmation is the only source that's definitely right for your flight.

One thing that catches people: on a codeshare, the rules that apply are often the operating airline's, not those of the airline whose name is on your ticket.

Pack for the return, not the departure

A bag that's exactly on the limit leaving can't bring anything back.

That's invisible while you're packing at home, and you discover it repacking in a hotel room on the last morning. So decide the reserve up front: Reserved for the journey home takes it out of the headroom, and Room left after your return reserve is the honest figure.

Set it to zero if you're genuinely buying nothing. If you turn out to have been pessimistic, you've travelled slightly lighter, which nobody has ever regretted at an airport.

Put it on a scale

Everything above is an estimate until something has been weighed, and estimates are exactly what get people caught.

No luggage scale? Bathroom scales work:

1. Stand on them holding the bag, note the figure
2. Stand on them without it
3. Take the difference

That's accurate enough to tell you whether you're at 21 kg or 25 kg, which is the actual decision. A proper luggage scale costs very little and is worth it if you fly often.

Units are where this goes quietly wrong

The fields say kilograms because most allowances are quoted that way, but the arithmetic is unit-agnostic — enter pounds throughout and every output is in pounds.

The risk is mixing them, which is easy when the allowance is in kilograms and your bathroom scale reads pounds. And the two common allowances are close enough to be confused:

• 50 lb = 22.68 kg
• 23 kg = 50.7 lb

Near enough to look interchangeable, far enough apart to matter at the desk.

Free weight you're not using

Two things that cost nothing:

• Wear the heaviest shoes and coat. Shoes are usually the densest thing in a bag, and anything on your body is outside both allowances.
• Check hand luggage separately. It's normally its own allowance — run the tool a second time with that bag's figures. Note that cabin bags often have a size limit that bites before the weight one does, and it's checked with a sizer at the gate rather than a scale.

If you're close, compare the prices

Room left in the allowance going negative means something comes out — or that you pay.

Many airlines price excess baggage at the desk deliberately high, while adding allowance online in advance can be a fraction of that. This tool doesn't try to price any of it, because those numbers vary by airline, route and timing and would be stale almost immediately.

But if you're within a kilogram or two, five minutes on the airline's own site comparing the advance price against the desk price is usually worth it — and it's a much better outcome than repacking on the terminal floor.