# Baggage revenue after the booking

Bags are the highest intent purchase after booking. Why filed allowances vary by fare and route, and why a wrong allowance costs more than no allowance.

Bag revenue has a trigger, and the trigger is not the booking. It is the moment
somebody opens a suitcase and works out that what they own does not fit inside
what they have paid for.

Baggage is the highest intent purchase in the post-booking window, because
packing is what makes a traveller think about it. The revenue depends on showing
the allowance the airline actually filed for that fare and that route. An
allowance shown wrongly costs more than an allowance not shown at all.

## Intent arrives late, and it arrives certain

Most extras have to be argued for. A bag does not. Nobody needs convincing that
luggage is useful, nobody researches whether they want their belongings at the
destination, and there is no competing product to compare against. The only
question is whether the traveller already has enough allowance, and that is a
factual question with one answer.

This is the unusual property worth building around. The hard part of
merchandising a bag is not persuasion. It is arriving at the right moment with
the right number.

## The allowance belongs to the itinerary, not to the airline

The instinct is to think of an allowance as an airline policy. It behaves much
more like a property of the specific trip.

| What varies | Why | What it means for the sale |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Fare family | The allowance is filed against the fare, not the flight | Two travellers in adjacent seats can hold different allowances |
| Route and market | Filing differs by region, and long haul often differs from short haul | A return trip can carry a different allowance in each direction |
| Pieces or weight | Some markets are filed by piece count, others by total weight | The same wording means two different things to a traveller |
| Loyalty status | Status adds allowance on top of whatever the fare carries | The right number depends on who is flying, not just what was bought |
| More than one airline | A through itinerary is not simply governed by the first carrier | The obvious answer is frequently the wrong one |

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary state of a filed allowance, and it is
why a page that prints one number for a whole airline is guessing. The number
that matters is the one for this fare, this direction, this traveller, on this
trip.

The last row of that table is the one that trips people up. A trip flown partly
on one airline and partly on another is not governed by whichever name appears
first on the itinerary. The industry has rules for deciding whose allowance
applies across a through journey, they depend on the route and the airlines
involved, and the answer they produce is regularly not the one a traveller would
guess. It is also the case a generic help page never covers, which is precisely
why getting it right is worth something: the traveller who cannot find a
straight answer anywhere else remembers where they finally got one.

## Wrong is worse than nothing

The failure is asymmetric, which is the part programmes underestimate.

**Caution:** Not showing an allowance costs you a sale. Showing the wrong one costs you the
sale, a refund, a support contact, and the traveller's confidence in everything
else on the page. Only one of those two mistakes is recoverable.

Overstating an allowance is the expensive direction. The traveller reads that
they already have two bags, buys nothing, and discovers the truth at a counter
where the price is higher and the mood is worse. Understating it is cheaper but
still corrosive: they buy something they already had, notice, and ask for it
back.

The honest position is to state plainly what is known and to say plainly when it
is not. A traveller told that an allowance could not be confirmed for one leg
will check. A traveller told the wrong number confidently will not.

## Intent rises sharply close to departure

Bag demand is not spread evenly across the weeks between booking and flying. It
concentrates.

**Illustrative shape of bag intent before departure**

| Category | Illustrative intent index |
| --- | --- |
| 60 days out | 10 |
| 30 days | 15 |
| 14 days | 30 |
| 7 days | 55 |
| 3 days | 85 |
| 1 day | 100 |

Bag intent rises late and concentrates in the final fortnight, when packing begins. The values here are a round illustrative shape indexed to the day before departure, used to explain the pattern rather than to report measured data.

The shape has a direct operational consequence. If most of the intent lives in
the last fortnight, then the message sent a few days before departure matters
more than the confirmation page sent immediately after booking, and the two
should not carry the same content.

It also means the allowance has to be correct at the moment the reminder goes
out rather than at the moment of booking. Fares get changed, itineraries get
reissued, and status gets earned in between. An allowance calculated once and
cached for two months is a wrong number waiting for a schedule to send it.

## The arithmetic is unglamorous and it adds up

Bags earn more per sale than seats and attach to fewer bookings, which puts them
on the opposite side of the trade described in attach rate measurement.

Take a thousand bookings, and suppose one in ten adds a bag at sixty dollars.
That is six thousand dollars from a product nobody had to be sold. The lever is
rarely the price, which the airline has filed anyway. It is reach and timing:
how many of those travellers were asked at all, and whether the asking happened
while the suitcase was open. Those figures are round illustrations, not measured
results.

## Work out when your travellers are actually packing

If bag offers are only on the confirmation page, the timing is doing more damage than the pricing is.

[Talk to us](mailto:hello@departcart.com)

## Frequently asked questions

### Why do bags sell better after booking than during it?

Because the trigger is packing, not buying. At the point of booking a traveller is comparing fares and has not thought about luggage. Weeks later, standing over a suitcase, the question answers itself and no persuasion is required.

### Why does the same flight show different baggage allowances?

Because the allowance belongs to the fare rather than the flight. Two travellers in adjacent seats on different fare families can hold different allowances, and loyalty status can add more on top of either one.

### What happens if the allowance shown is wrong?

Both directions cost money. Overstate it and the traveller buys nothing, then pays at the airport counter and blames whoever sold the trip. Understate it and they buy something they already had, then ask for it back.

### When is the best moment to show a bag offer?

Later than most programmes assume. Intent climbs steeply in the final fortnight before departure, so a well timed reminder usually earns more than the confirmation page immediately after booking does.