Boldly Go Solo

I love how travel marketers will find the bright side in any bit of rotten news, so long as it is a way to promote their clients.

Recently, shockingly and amazingly, Spirit Airlines announced it would charge for overhead luggage now, as well as checked bags. By the time you pay for luggage in the overhead and stowed below, why not just buy a new car and shove the stuff in the trunk? For free.

(In a related "news" item, the satirical website, the onion, announced that "cash-strapped American Airlines announced a new series of fees this
week that will apply to all customers not currently flying, scheduled
to fly, or even thinking about flying aboard the commercial carrier."**)

The way things are going, it's almost believable!

Anyway, to get back to the oh-so-clever marketers, I was amused to see that the Vacation Rental Managers Association offers this advice. And I paraphrase:

Pack even less than you tried to cram into your suitcases when you didn't want to pay for checked luggage because villa and condo rentals often come with washers and dryers. So how much do you have to bring in the way of clean clothes really? 

How's that for soothing? You can save airline luggage fees by spending your vacation doing laundry. What a great idea!

Even better: Wear extra pairs of underpants and socks and a few shirts onto the plane and you won't have to carry a bag at all!

The middle layers will all be clean when you get where you're going and you can easily wash the layer next to your body and the outside layer, if it happens to sustain any spillage while eating your carry on food, which you brought because the airline doesn't give you anything to eat without also charging you.

One little problem is that since you can no longer bring much in the way of liquids on the plane, you'll have toss some things out of the see-through plastic bag you need to go through security with, so you can throw in bottles of detergent. Or else you're also going to have to spend precious vacation time shopping for the laundry soap.

The association mentions that you can ship your baggage ahead because vacation rental managers can store the items for you until you arrive. But wait. Doesn't that cost a lot of money? Perhaps more than paying for a checked bag?

I give up.

But no, I'm not staying home.  

**The Onion news item is from 2008, but interestingly, NBC News' television anchor, Brian Williams, quoted it in tonight's broadcast.