There are few things more annoying than being forced to check your carry-on bag because a gate agent says there is no overhead bin space left, only to find plenty of space onboard. It’s time for gate agents to stop lying about this.
Dear Gate Agents, Stop Lying About Overhead Bin Space
A frequent flyer recently shared a boarding experience on United Airlines that perfectly captures a growing airline problem: passengers being told overhead bins are “full” when they clearly are not.
Group 3 boarding on flight from SFO to EWR.
Flight delayed, fine whatever. They of course make the standard announcement that “it is a full flight and we will be enforcing checked bags after group X.”
They start the boarding process and quickly state that the overhead bin space is full. They start tagging everyone’s bag. The group of elderly folks in front of me makes a fuss because they are packing medications in their only carry on, rightfully so.
I get on the plane (I only flew with a backpack) and there is HELLA space on the plane. The plane is about to take off and there are still completely empty bins.
The ticket scanner was very ruthless about it and when the elderly folks asked her to check if there is space, she just kept repeating the same line over and over, “I can put on the next flight, which departs tomorrow.”
What the hell kind of airline is this?? What reality are they living in??
I believe it is a subversive plot to some force people to upgrade to an earlier boarding group? If you buy basic economy you are just treated like a prisoner.
That’s my rant and a sick trend I’m seeing as a monthly flyer.
This story rings painfully true, because it is no longer an exception. It is standard operating procedure. He was flying United Airlines, the airline I also fly the most, and it is indeed a common issue.
Gate agents are increasingly declaring overhead bins “full” early in the boarding process, tagging bags by boarding group rather than by actual capacity, and refusing to reassess even when empty bins are plainly visible onboard. The statement is often demonstrably false, yet there is no argument permitted.
From the airline’s perspective, early bag checks speed boarding, reduce aisle congestion, and limit disputes once passengers are on the aircraft. That’s a reasonable operational goal, but the problem is the lie used to justify it.
When elderly passengers carrying medication are told there is “no space” and threatened with rebooking to the next day, while empty bins remain unused, that is not efficiency, it is callous indifference.
There is also a financial undertone here that airlines would rather not acknowledge. Overhead bin access has been monetized. Earlier boarding groups are sold as insurance against exactly this scenario. Aggressively enforcing bag checks before bins are actually full conditions passengers to pay more next time…just to avoid the hassle.
Gate agents may be enforcing policies designed above them, but they can be villains too. The refusal to verify reality, the robotic repetition of scripts, and the unwillingness to exercise judgment erode trust quickly.
Take this United flight to Newark, example. Flight attendants and gate agents can easily communicate via their company-issued iPhones. That messaging feature gives gate agents real-time updates on overhead bin space, taking out much of the guesswork (and delay when passengers are sent onboard when the bins are indeed full).
Passengers understand full flights and limited space. What they do not accept is being told something is full when it is not, especially when the alternative proposed is to rebook the next day.
Whether this comes from rogue gate agents or airlines pushing on-time departures above anything else, it’s a common frustration that I see all the time in my own travels, even on planes with new and larger overhead bins.
CONCLUSION
Overhead bin chaos is not new. What is new is the normalization of telling passengers something that is plainly untrue to make boarding easier (and perhaps nefariously, make upsells more effective).
Increasingly often, airlines have a credibility problem, not an overhead bin problem.
I flew United on Wednesday and a flight attendant announced that there was plenty of space for everyone’s bags despite what they were told. It didn’t impact me since I’m group 1 but I thanked him for taking care of passengers. He stated they have no control over what the gate agents tell the passengers. It would be nice if they collaborated to improve the customer experience.
Their iPhones easily allow them to do this. Makes no sense to me!
It is about time that all airlines started enforcing carry on limits which because this is not done are the primary cause of delayed boarding and deplaning. Unfortunately, passengers carrying on the prescribed limit one bag that fits the sizer and a personal item is the exception not the rule. I can assure you without equivocation that I have never encountered the situation described but have on every flight I have ever boarded in the past five years noted excessive carryon baggage ie passengers with a roller bag and large backpacks front and back plus a brief case. In addition there are still passengers who try to cram nonstandard roller bags into the overhead bins which will never accommodate them further delaying boarding. As a result of excessive carryons I was once asked on an AC flight to remove my briefcase and coat from the overhead bin and place these items under the seat in front of me. I declined and when asked why, advised the FA that I had observe the carry on rules and my size 13 feet, Viator and briefcase would not comfortably fit under the seat in front of me. The zzz Fa found another solution.
This issue will not go away until until the FAA finds a way around bags must travel with traveller. Passengers on business want to be able to change flights if necessary and the bags with traveller makes this impossible with checked baggage. But the real proble is that all airlines have monetized baggage from cutting down on free bags for lower fares, to limiting checked bags etc. This tends to encourage too many to carry on all that they can to beat the system. As the rules are seldom enforced they tend to get away with it.
An obvious solution would be to make every passenger pay for everything they carry on and restore free checked bags (2) with weight limitations which are enforced. Premium cabin would have an exception.
There has to be a better way…
The better way is to stop the carry-on farce .
No, they don’t “need” to stop lying. They have no reason compelling them to stop lying about anything. So they won’t.
Headline should read: “I Wish Gate Agents Would Stop Lying About Overhead Bin Space, But They Won’t.”
Fascinated to ponder what that comment reveals about how you might approach your work, Dick. I for one try to do my best for my clients even when not compelled by contractual and statutory language. But to each their own.
I rarely encounter this, but if it does then let them tag your bag and when you get to the bottom of the jetway ask the F/As if there is room for it. If they say yes then bring it onboard. Pretty simple especially for a road warrior.
This is good advice. I would also add; dont make a fuss, because I have seen this trigger gate agents to keep the bag up by them and take it down themselves at the end of boarding
@rebel: this does not always work – in fact, I’ve been in situations where there is room, but because the bag is tagged, the baggage handler stationed at door demands it (so as to prevent something like a lost baggage claim).
When I worked at Delta, if the passenger had to gate check a bag and came back up to the boarding door and said there was room, we let them take the bag on, removed the tag so the agent could cancel it in the system.
Gate agents are told which groups they need to collect bags from, it calculated by the computer depending on passengers, plane etc. The company writes the script they follow. They follow instructions otherwise they are blamed for the plane departing late, especially if it’s due to bags. Stop calling them liars.
Which gate agents are you talking about? What carrier?
And to be clear, I understand that gate agents may act in fear to get the flight out in time.
That doesn’t make it great policy…
For some airlines, I have a shapeless bag with wheels. That bag never gets tagged but it’s a little smaller than a rollaboard.
There is a technology driven solution. That would be to know how many rollaboards there is space for and then to have passengers declare upon check=in.
I have flown out of London Heathrow with British Airways 4 times in the last 2 months and can tell you exactly the same story.
An insistence that all groups from 4 onwards MUST check their carry on bags due to it being a full flight. And of course when you are seated, the bins have plenty of space (probably because all the carry ons are now in the hold).
Yet oddly, on the return flights, no issues at all.
I always travel carry on only. With a single wheeled case (so no personal item as well) and have my meds, ipad and other valuables in that case so no I don’t want it out of sight.
One gate agent told me to take those things out of the case. When I asked where I should put them she just waved me through realising she was caught out!
But I then found the answer. In my carry on I usually have a couple of battery banks. Nothing fancy just the usual Anker stuff. But these of course are prohibited from being checked so now when the gate agent won’t be reasonable and actually starts to print the label, by law, they must ask if you have got prohibited items in the case you are about to check at which point I just look them in the eye and say YES! At this point, by law they are not allowed to check it and have no reasonable cause deny boarding 🙂 Check mate!
If they could stop the people from coming on with 3-4 bags or more ( every flight has a least 5-6 people with too much stuff)and putting more than 1 item in the overhead bins people in groups 5-6-7 might have a fighting chance to keep their stuff vs making them check their carry-on bags…
Or maybe just maybe passengers could learn to pack lighter and not put coats and things that could fit underneath their seat in the overhead bins. A wild thought I know
I think it has to do with flight attendants not wanting to lift overhead bins that hang down when you open them, because on a recent flight on an airline that I won’t name, but whose name sounds like “together airlines” from San Francisco to san diego the gate agent kept making a fuzz about how the overhead bins were the “new overhead bins that are larger and heavier” as if that was a problem? And once on board, one of the flight attendants complained that the bins were “still too full.”
Sigh. Overhead bins are another annoyance and related to the break down of common courtesy of the flying public today. When I started my career as a UAL F/A, 1972, there were no overhead bins, only open racks intended for coats and hats. You could put a small carry-on under the seat in front of you. Boarding was accomplished quickly and politely. I truly wish the overhead storage had stayed the way it was.
would be interesting to know if all of these gate-checked bags are part of the reason that UA ends up dead last in baggage handling among US airlines.
I’ve seen the gate agent pull up a number based on aircraft that is supposed to be the number of bags that can fit and they just count and when it gets to that number, they start checking.
I also often hear the FA checking with the ones in the back to see how much space is left and then relay it back to the GA.
I fly UA often and see this both all the time.
The OP was on SFO-EWR which is a different beast. They often use the high density 777 were they added a bunch more seats without adding more bin space. To make things worse the bins are the old type and you can basically fit only one bag in each bin in the middle section. So they always run out of space very early. The gate agents seem to be used to this on this route and I always see them behave rather rudely because they are in a hurry to try to get the flight out.
Regardless I think the carry-on policies here in the US are far better than anywhere else where they limit you by weight where you can only carry 6-10kg. This is ridiculous considering my bag weighs over 3 kg empty.
If the op is confident that there is empty bin space one can simply remove the bag tag and just take it onto the plane. I’ve done this many times in the past it just depends on how they handle the bag after it’s tagged. Sometimes they immediately confiscate it sometimes they tell you to leave it in some vague location. In the latter case it is usually pretty easy to just rip the tag off and get on the plane
The same situation happened to me on a recent UA flight on a B737. Althought I was in Group 2, before G1 even finished boarding, the agent told everyone that there were no more overhead bin space available. I was able to convince the agent to allow me to bring the carry-on on board because we had a tight international connection. However, she still attached a barcoded luggage tag and told to check with the flight attendants if there was space. If not, I was to check the bag in. Of course, there was plenty of overbin space when we entered the plane.
This is some crazy sh*t, for sure. FWIW, I can say airlines I fly (Delta, Alaska, and AeroMexico) don’t do this. They always ask for volunteers, but none of the weird group-based strategies and no compulsion. Glad I don’t fly United anymore.
Whenever I read stories like this I’m reminded of how civilised domestic air travel is in Australia. Melbourne-Sydney is; and has been for decades; one of the businest city pairs on earth, and these days is mostly flown with 737/A320 aircraft, yet it’s vanishingly rare for a gate agent to demand that passengers check their cabin bags because of limited overhead locker space.
Ugh… “Busiest” city-pairs O_o
While you are only looking at this from a single perspective, from that viewpoint you’re correct. Among other ways to look at it are if the airlines were more reasonable about offering free checked bags then fewer people would try to schlep their large bags into the cabin. Or the over-entitled people who have way too much cabin bags to fit in their portion of the overhead bin and under the seat in front of them. Or the fact that some airlines have reduced the number of gate agents, which means that the single agent trying to handle multiple things at once has to err on the side of caution and tag more bags out of desperation.
Your basic premise isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t cover a lot of the underlying reasons why agents are doing this.
One thing that is missing is that the gate agent stating you can be placed on a flight the following day does nothing to insure the bag(s) will be allowed in the cabin on the following day’s flight.
Exactly. Great point.
I know this doesn’t work for elderly, but i always travel with a 35L backpack and it almost always have a lithium ion battery bank in it. Never once have I been asked to gate check it despite being one of the last to board.
I have to imagine the monetization of the boarding process plays into longer boarding times. Boarding by section of the plane .. like some airlines in Asia … sounds like a far more efficient process.
at this point with United, especially when flying out of a major hub like SFO and even more so the fact your are flying to a major hub, almost everyone has some sort of status and as the old saying goes, when everyone has status, no one has status. I almost always fly united and typically out of SFO and in most cases the plane is 90% full by the time they get through boarding group 2