I'm going to post a short extract from:
The Guardian. Digested Week
Emma Brockes does not name the carrier
At the airport in Charleston, South Carolina there is pandemonium at the gate. Airline staff have informed a group of passengers they hold a special, cheap ticket that denies them the right to take a carry-on bag. The agents blame Expedia. A quick online search indicates the airline is totally in on it (the policy soft-launched last summer), but either way, holders of a “basic economy” ticket can now only board with “one small, personal item”. No one in the queue has heard of this. Everyone is towing, in the American style, a huge wheelie suitcase, which they are invited to pay $40 to stow. There is a lot of waving and shouting. Several people look as if they might need medical attention.
I do not, it turns out, have the cheapest and most terrible ticket. I have merely the standard, terrible ticket which, for the first time, comes with an experience I have read about but never actually gone through. I’m travelling with my two eight-year-olds and, in spite of logging on to a website on the very second that check-in opened, they have been seated apart from me and each other. For the privilege of taking a flight in which my kids aren’t freaking out the entire route, I am invited to pay a further $100.
Since the pandemic, air travel in the US has become more expensive, less pleasant, and subject to greater delays, but these new gouging initiatives are something else.