[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

How to Beat Airline Fees: The Add-Ons They Bury and How to Dodge Them

Learning how to avoid airline fees is mostly learning where they hide them. Seat fees, bag-size traps, and the 'cheap' fare that costs more once you can actually fly on it.

The first time I really understood how to avoid airline fees was the day a €19 flight to Milan became €94 by the time I’d actually be allowed to board with a bag and sit in a seat. Nineteen euros. Ninety-four. And the maddening part is that none of it was an accident — the whole booking flow is engineered, beautifully, evilly, to peel another tenner off you at every screen. So let’s take their machine apart.

Start here, because it reframes everything. On the low-cost carriers, the price you see in the search results is not the price of flying anywhere with anything. It’s the price of you, alone, with a small bag, in a random middle seat, having added nothing. It’s a number designed to win the price-comparison click and absolutely nothing else.

Every screen after that is a tollbooth. Seat? Fee. Bag? Fee. Bag that’s slightly bigger? Bigger fee. Check in at the airport instead of online? Genuinely outrageous fee. The skill isn’t finding the cheapest headline — it’s predicting the all-in price before you book, because the cheapest headline is often the dearest flight once it’s loaded up.

This is the easiest money you’ll save, because seat selection is almost always optional and they really, really don’t want you to know that. They’ll nudge hard — “only 3 seats left at this price!”, the seat map glowing red with fees — to make picking (and paying) feel mandatory.

It isn’t. Skip it. If you don’t pay to choose, the system assigns you a seat for free at check-in. You don’t get to pick it, and if you’re travelling with someone you might not sit together — but on a two-hour hop, who cares. I’ve skipped seat fees on dozens of flights and the “punishment” is occasionally a middle seat. For the price of a nice dinner saved, I’ll take the middle seat.

The exception worth paying for: a genuinely long flight, or travelling with a small kid you actually need beside you. Pick your battles. The short-haul seat fee is the one to refuse on reflex.

Here’s the dirtiest one. The free “personal item” allowance — the small bag that goes under the seat — has dimensions that are juuust small enough to be annoying, and they vary by airline on purpose. A bag that flies free on one carrier is an oversize charge on the next. And the gate-side sizer cage is where they make a killing, because if your bag doesn’t drop in, you pay a penalty fee that’s often more than the original flight.

Defend yourself with a tape measure, at home, before you leave. Look up that specific airline’s personal-item dimensions for that specific booking and measure your bag against them — soft bag squished down the way it’ll actually be, not puffed up. Do not trust “it fit last time on a different airline.” Last time was a different cage.

This is the subtle one and it catches experienced travellers. Sometimes the bare-bones fare, by the time you’ve added the bag and seat you genuinely need, costs more than the airline’s own bundled “plus” fare — or more than a normal full-service carrier’s ticket that already includes a bag and a seat. The cheap fare was only cheap as long as you didn’t actually need to, you know, travel.

So always price the bundle against the build-your-own. If you need a cabin bag and a seat, the mid-tier fare that includes both is frequently cheaper than the basic fare plus those two add-ons bought separately. They count on you anchoring to the low number and never doing that comparison. Do the comparison.

• Airport check-in / printed boarding pass: check in online and have the pass on your phone. Some carriers charge eye-watering amounts to print one at the airport. Screenshot it offline too, in case the app dies.
• Payment surcharges: some airlines add a fee for certain cards. A different card in your wallet can quietly dodge it — check the small print at the payment screen.
• Priority boarding: almost never worth it on a flight with assigned (or randomly assigned) seats. You’re paying to stand in a queue slightly sooner. Skip.
• Travel insurance pre-ticked: they love to pre-select an insurance add-on and bury the opt-out. Always uncheck it and decide separately; the bundled one is usually poor value anyway.
• Currency conversion at booking: if the site offers to charge you in your home currency, decline and pay in the local one. Their conversion rate is reliably worse than your bank’s.

None of this is about being cheap for its own sake. It’s that these fees are designed to extract money through inattention — the pre-ticked box, the scary red seat map, the cage you didn’t measure for. Pay attention at exactly the moments they’re hoping you won’t, and the €19 flight can stay closer to €19.

The airlines didn’t make the fares dishonest, exactly — they made them a test of how carefully you read. Read carefully, run the dummy booking, measure your bag, and you’ll pass it every single time.

This article contains affiliate links marked rel="sponsored". We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.