Checking Your Bag? Here's $25...

(Via Felix Salmon)

[Freightdawg's] Eric [Joiner] has some very smart and well-informed analysis of the economics of checking bags: essentially, if, like Southwest, you only have one kind of aircraft, then checking bags saves you money because it speeds up the rate at which passengers get on and off the plane. And he knows that the economics of reducing the bag-check fee from $25 to $0 are essentially the same as the economics of reducing it from $0 to -$25. And so:

What if an air carrier said…rather than charge you a fee to check a bag, They would PAY you to do so?

I believe I'd say Check my bag...please. Particularly if they also followed Felix's suggestion of adding an RFID tag to each bag for tracking.