An Icelandic traveller and his teenage daughter were wrongly charged a combined £96 by easyJet after a defective baggage sizer at London Gatwick prevented their properly sized luggage from fitting inside.
Adalsteinn Svan Hjelm was transiting through the airport in April this year on a journey from Iceland to Greece when staff subjected the pair’s Samsonite bags to a sizing cage check.
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Despite the luggage meeting the airline’s official size requirements, easyJet employees insisted the bags were non-compliant and levied a £48 penalty on each passenger.
The budget carrier ultimately admitted the measuring equipment was faulty – but only after Mr Hjelm waged a protracted battle to prove his case.
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Mr Hjelm immediately sensed the equipment itself was at fault.
He told consumer champion Which?: “I suspected that the baggage sizer itself had been altered. The internal side bulkheads appeared to have been positioned incorrectly, reducing the usable width of the sizer and preventing a compliant bag from fitting correctly.”
He raised his concerns with gate staff on the spot, but his objections were dismissed.
The airline’s employees proceeded to collect the £96 charge regardless of his protests.
Mr Hjelm’s core worry was that the metal bars within the sizing cage had been set too narrowly, making it physically impossible for bags that met easyJet’s own specifications to pass the test.
His efforts to resolve the matter through easyJet’s customer service department proved fruitless, and a subsequent claim filed via the airline’s adjudicator, AviationADR, was also rejected.
Mr Hjelm said: “What concerns me most is that neither easyJet nor AviationADR independently inspected or physically measured the baggage sizer. Instead, the decision relied solely on easyJet’s assurance that the equipment was correctly configured.”
He then approached Samsonite directly, who confirmed the bags were specifically designed to comply with easyJet’s size limits.
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As a final resort, Mr Hjelm wrote to senior figures within the airline, attaching photographic evidence demonstrating the sizer was misconfigured.
An easyJet employee took his complaint seriously and initiated an investigation into the Gatwick equipment, which concluded that the metal bars had indeed been incorrectly positioned.
Mr Hjelm received a full refund, and the airline pledged to repair or replace the sizer.
Consumer group Which? cautioned that thousands of travellers may have been similarly penalised due to the defective equipment.
Rory Boland, Editor of Which? Travel, told the Daily Mail: “This is the second time we have caught easyJet wrongfully fining travellers to line their own pockets. Who knows how many passengers have been forced to pay a penalty fee because of easyJet’s own ineptitude.”
He added: “What we do know is easyJet is profiting from fining passengers for bags it claims are oversized, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it has not committed to take any wider action to review how it checks bag sizes.”
Last year it emerged that easyJet staff can earn bonuses for identifying oversized luggage.
A spokesman from easyJet said: “We always want to ensure our cabin bag rules are applied fairly.
“The bag sizers are checked weekly, or sooner if an issue is identified, and maintained and if an issue with a bag sizer is identified, it is reported by our ground crew and removed and fixed.
“Despite the independent Aviation ADR ruling in our favour, we have now provided Mr Hjelm with a refund as a gesture of goodwill.”
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