Further to my previous article in December: The Perils Of Hand Luggage, it appears that passenger confusion could be about to get worse, as a result of the partial relaxation of the one-bag hand luggage limit.

Of course this ought to be great news particularly for we women who nearly always have hand luggage AND a handbag, but it appears that the new rules are not going to apply consistently across all airports and that within an airport individual airlines are operating their own security policies and are expected to enforce their own baggage restrictions!

“The Government had been under intense pressure to relax the rule, which was imposed after an alleged terrorism plot to down transatlantic airlines was foiled in August 2006. The restrictions were initially imposed to prevent airports seizing up because of the more intensive searches of hand luggage.

Ministers were torn between either waiting until they were confident that all airports could cope with relaxed rules, or implementing the changes gradually. It was left to airports to convince the Department for Transport that they could cope with easing the rules without passengers facing unreasonable delays to pass through security.”

SO taking the SE as an example: whilst Heathrow and Stanstead has installed new security scanners, Gatwick is not ready to ease the restrictions today, and looking more closely at Stanstead: Easyjet and Ryanair are sticking with the one-bag rule, while other carriers eg. American from today will allow two pieces of hand luggage, which all means for we poor passengers that we will have to check carefully before flying, and IF you should end up travelling into and out of different airports OR on two different carriers life could get very complicated!

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