Ryanair and pooling of luggage

[mummynumnum]

Have flights to France booked in Aug as DH dad lives there. Went with dd at 18mths a few yrs ago and just took hand luggage. Was bit of a pain carrying it round airport and was thinking about just booking one suitcase in this time but saw something on the web about cant pool luggage. Does that mean I cant take one suitcase with DH, mine, dd and ds (16wks) stuff in?

That just means you can't pool the weight of all yor luggage, you're allowed to share suitcase space.

Ryanair are notorious sticklers on this. You have to take individual pieces of luggage (assuming you've pre-booked hold space) to a max of 15k IIRC. Infants don't get an allowance.

Have you got two small suitcases? You'll have to pay the hold charge four times (each way for both items) but that's how they makes their money...

You cannot say, eg. I have a suitcase with 5kg weight and DH has a case with 20kg weight so we are together on average under the 15kg weight limit.

If you can fit enough into one case with just 15kg weight then that is ok.

Although I am in awe of you if you can get by with so little luggage for a family of 4, one a baby.

unless you can get it all into one 15 kilo suitcase of course - think of it as a challenge

Luckily we borrow alot from dh dads friends like cot etc and we stay at his and obv have good washing facilities etc....Will have a go at getting it in one 15kg suitcase...DH takes hardly anything!

My dh said he only takes about a kilo of stuff so should be ok on the 15kg!

Make good use of your hand luggage too

Ryanair are ridiculously tight on this, we saw people being made to repack because one bag was 15.2 kilos and the other 14.8.

We have one of those luggage scales which means you can keep it at less than 15 kilos which is actually more than you think and make sure you use up your cabin allowance.

when we flew back from derry at christmas (admittedly a quiet airport) we over-packed our hand luggage, then i stuck our one suitcase on some unused check in scales and filled it from the hand luggage to the 15kg limit. this was relatively easy as we'd received books and stuff as christmas presents.

don't forget your hand luggage allowance though, unless you are taking lead with you i don't think you could physically fit more than 10kg of stuff into a bag of the correct size, and you, dh and dd will all be entitled to 10kg each. in fact could you even carry 35kg of stuff? i'm sure we couldn't.

Thanks for the tips

As everyone else has said, you can't combine the weigh of your suitcases and say the total is less than the max. You can however, put whatever you want (within reason) in your suitcase.

We're planning on buying a couple of cheap holdalls that are just the right size for cabin baggage - that way we can get the max out of that. DD will still be in nappies and want to carry plenty of stuff for her in case of delays etc

I wasn't brave enough to only book one case for me, DH and 14mo DD so we've booked two. Couldn't quite visualise 15kg but I suspect 30kg will be plenty.