CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Charging for Carry-On Bags

NARRATOR: Not long ago, a carry-on bag was simply part of the ticket, as unremarkable as the seat itself. Today, on a growing share of discount fares, travellers who wish to use the overhead bin must pay for the privilege, often thirty dollars or more each way. The practice, long familiar in Europe, has steadily crept into Canadian skies, provoking predictable outrage, though whether that outrage is entirely deserved is a more complicated question.

NARRATOR: Aviation consultant Gregory Tam, who advises several low-cost carriers, maintains that the fee is not a hidden charge but an honest one. Under the old model, he points out, the business traveller with a single briefcase was quietly paying for the family hauling three overstuffed suitcases into the cabin. Unbundling, as the industry calls it, lets the lightest packers pay the least, and Tam credits it with putting cross-country flights within reach of students and pensioners who once stayed home, a democratizing effect that critics, in his view, conveniently overlook. Fewer oversized bags, he adds, also means quicker boarding.

NARRATOR: Consumer advocate Lisa Barrett finds this reasoning convenient, if not altogether wrong. Cheaper base fares have, she acknowledges, opened the skies to new travellers; her quarrel is with the way the fee is revealed. The price that appears first in an online search, she observes, is rarely the price anyone pays, and by the time the bag charge surfaces on the final screen, most customers have invested too much effort to begin again. To Barrett, that resembles an ambush more than a choice. Comparison shopping, supposedly the engine of a competitive marketplace, becomes nearly impossible when every carrier calculates its extras differently. Nor is she persuaded by the claim about boarding: travellers unwilling to pay, she notes, simply cram everything into one bulging personal item and wedge it under the seat, which hardly speeds anyone along.

NARRATOR: Barrett would stop short of banning the fee. Instead, she wants airlines required to display the complete cost, bag included, from the very first search, so that comparisons are genuine. Tam counters that such regulations would make discount fares look less competitive and could eventually drive some smaller carriers out of business. Yet if a fare only looks affordable until the final click, one might reasonably ask how affordable it ever was. Passengers may be prepared to pay for what they carry; what they seem to resent is discovering the price too late.