Condor carry-on luggage check procedure

Question

When recently I was traveling on Condor I had opted for check-in at the counter since I had to drop a bag as well. The agent first weighted my hold luggage and then my carry-on together with the hold luggage, to then apply a "approved cabin baggage" tag to my carry-on.

Q: What is the standard procedure for size/weight controls of cabin luggage on Condor?

I am confused since I might as well have chosen to have a mobile or self-printed boarding pass and fly without hold luggage, in which case I never would have gotten the tag. Also neither at the gate nor when accessing the plane, did anyone seem to care about cabin luggage or the tags. Finally, the agent checking me in did check and tag my carry-on only after me asking her about it, and they recuperated my hold bag in order to do so, therefore the standard procedure seems to include weighing cabin and hold luggage together.

I am hoping for a general answer, but in case that turns out too broad, then the above happened at Naples airport (NAP). I am already aware of official luggage rules and only interested in the standard practice at the airport.

Answer 1

In my experience, an airline reserves the right to weigh any cabin luggage if they think it exceeds the allowed limit. And if it does, you will need to pay overweight charges. This can happen at the check-in counter or at the boarding counter. If we talk specifically about Condor:

• For safety reasons, hand baggage may be weighed if there is reason to believe that it exceeds the maximum limit for hand baggage.
• For safety reasons, the cabin crew must stow excess, unpermitted items of baggage in the cargo hold with the other checked baggage.
• If the permitted hand baggage allowance is exceeded, excess baggage charges will be charged.

If you are at the check-in counter and the airline employee thinks your cabin bag is out of dimensions or overweight they will get it weighed to verify. This happened to me at JFK. Apart from this, I have seen the airline personnel charging people for oversized bags at the boarding counter; this too in the US.

Another interesting thing I have seen is that the airline personnel take your cabin luggage and book it as a hold luggage at the boarding counter. They will tag it with the hold luggage stickers and give you the other half on the spot. How were they doing this? A guy was visually inspecting the bags and picking them up to see (I guess) dimensions and an idea of weight. This happened on QTR and there were no charges, probably because their ticket has a default hold/cabin weight allowance.

About the cabin luggage tags, that seems to be more of an airport thing rather than an airline thing. Only at one place, at LHE, I was asked by an officer at the scanning machine to go back to the airline counter and get my cabin bag tag. Also at another time, the officers at the scanning machines were putting on missing cabin tags themselves after the bags passed through the scan. So I can assume it is more of a security or airport related thing. One way a cabin bag tag may come in handy is if you actually write down your name and address on it and you lose it. Some concerned citizen may go through the hassle of sending it to your address.

Answer 2

I am confused since I might as well have chosen to have a mobile or self-printed boarding pass and fly without hold luggage, in which case I never would have gotten the tag

This is perfectly normal even with low-cost airlines such as Wizz, speaking from my own experience as someone who nearly exclusively travels with hand luggage.

Unless the staff at the gate takes particular note of your bag because it looks "off" (and especially during long boarding queues, they rarely do unless the bag is clearly too large), then you can board the flight without any tags, and can usually get away with taking a too heavy or slightly too large bag onboard.

Not that I recommend it, but I never bother weighing my hand luggage for this reason, and have never faced issues with my hand bags (either a rucksack or a slightly too wide laptop bag)