Baggage Charges Have Become Excess Headache : Airlines: There are no standardized rules governing excess baggage charges. As a result, passengers are often being forced to pay large amounts of money with no recourse.

Consider this: You buy a ticket and fly from New York to Vienna. The plane makes a stop en route--in London.

Arriving for the flight in New York, you check in two large suitcases and take on board one large carry-on bag. The suitcases are full of clothes and gifts for friends in Austria. The carry-on bag contains important documents for a business meeting in Vienna. The two suitcases are checked through to Vienna.

Then, when leaving Vienna, you discover that you have less baggage than when you arrived. The gifts have been presented, and most of the business documents have been left for review by your Austrian colleagues. You pack your empty carry-on bag inside one of your check-in bags.

But when you arrive at the Vienna airport to check in for the return flight, airline officials tell you that you are overweight and will have to pay excess baggage charges of nearly $200.

Arguing with the counter agent proves fruitless, and rather than miss your flight or have your bags stay in Vienna, you cough up the extra money.

An unusual occurrence?

Hardly.

Excess baggage charges are, by far, one of the bigger airline rip-offs. It is one of the few areas of modern travel where deregulation does not apply, and where no standardized international rules exist.

Overweight tariffs are applied, or not applied, depending upon when you fly, who you are and the general mood of the airline counter agent. It is a capricious business, and more often than not the passenger is left literally holding the bag.

Airlines can, and do, charge outrageous amounts for excess baggage, especially on overseas flights.

The problem stems from the fact that different countries and various international tariffs dictate the baggage rules in each place you fly, and no one seems to know which tariff applies in which country, at which hour and on which day.

In the United States, the Civil Aeronautics Board did something to protect American passengers before the board was deregulated out of business. It began something called the “piece system.”

On domestic flights, passengers are allowed to check two pieces of luggage and have one carry-on. Generally speaking, each bag can weigh up to 70 pounds, one bag not to exceed 120 inches and the other 106 inches in total dimensions. (The carry-on, which can weigh up to 70 pounds on many airlines, must fit underneath the seat.)

Since 1977, the same CAB rule has also applied to international flights arriving in or departing from the United States, regardless of whether the carrier is domestic or international. If the origination or final destination is the United States, the piece system is to be used.

But in most parts of the world, the piece system does not exist and bags are weighed. Passengers are permitted to carry only 44 pounds in economy class or 66 pounds in first-class. Anything over that amount and you could be in real trouble. Excess baggage charges then cost three-quarters of one per cent of the first-class one-way airline ticket price per kilo (2.2 pounds) of overweight baggage.

For example, a coach passenger flying between London and Johannesburg, abiding by the piece system and carrying three bags, each weighing 70 pounds, could be charged 877 (about $1,440 U.S.) for being 166 pounds overweight. Another person, flying between London and Los Angeles with the same amount and weight of luggage, carries it all free.

Adding absurdity to insult, you can fly round trip between Johannesburg and London for less than half the excess baggage charges. And sometimes, even if you have foreign stopovers en route to your destination, some airlines will try to charge you excess baggage rates at each stop along the way.

Consider this classic case that happened a few years ago:

A young woman was flying British Airways on an around-the-world ticket. She was on her way home to the United States. She had with her the same amount of luggage with which she had left the United States, and which the airline had carried free.

But when she checked in at the British Airways ticket counter in Tokyo, she was told that she would have to pay $300 for excess baggage charges. She didn’t have $300. All she had were $150 in traveler’s checks. She handed them all over to the agent, which he accepted, and got on her flight . . . flat broke.

After spending a few days in London, she went to get on another British Airways flight and was charged again for excess baggage. This time, because she had spent all of her money, the woman abandoned one of her bags and had it shipped home later.

British Airways has no monopoly on this practice. For example, a passenger on a New York-London-Budapest-Rome-Athens flight is a through-fare ticket holder who has paid for all the stops.

But the ticket clerk in Budapest may not know that. And airport authorities at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport are notorious for not only extracting huge excess baggage charges from departing passengers, but in also demanding that the fees are paid in hard currency.

Some think that excess baggage charges started with the American stagecoach. Passengers were allowed to carry no more than 40 pounds of luggage apiece so that the strain on the horses would not be too great.

In the early days of flying, some of these rules made sense, but with the advent of DC-10s and 747s, baggage regulations limiting weight appear nonsensical. In fact, when the CAB began the piece system, it based its decision partly on the feeling that the 44-pound baggage limits were unfair because they were no longer related to flight safety.

Some airlines do seem to have a legitimate excess baggage problem. Philippine Airlines is constantly plagued with dozens of passengers checking in large, heavy cardboard boxes on each of their U.S. flights to Manila.

Eastern, which until recently flew an extensive route system in South America, has been plagued with excess baggage problems that will now be inherited by American, which bought the routes from Eastern last month.

At one point, Eastern printed a bilingual brochure explaining all of its excess baggage allowances and charges between the United States and South America. Other notices told passengers that because of excess weight on certain flights, the airline could not guarantee that all of their baggage would accompany them.

Nearly eight years ago, United and American began a system to charge for excess baggage, and many U.S. airlines followed suit. On domestic flights, passengers are allowed to check in three pieces of luggage at no charge.

Extra bags, up to three, will cost more. At United, extra bags will cost you $30 per bag. And overweight bags (71 to 100 pounds) will cost you an additional $30 per bag (up from $20 per bag just a year ago), while an overweight excess bag costs $60 (another increase). If the bag weighs more than 100 pounds, it will be $90.

At American Airlines, your extra baggage may not exceed 62 inches/50 pounds per bag. Extra bags up to three will cost $30 per bag, additional bags up to six will cost $50 and every bag thereafter will cost $100 per bag.

However, on international flights, other rules apply. For example, on United flights between the United States and Tokyo, each extra bag will cost $77. But if you wish to continue your journey to Bangkok, the extra--yes, extra --excess weight charges could zoom.

The cheapest Tokyo-Bangkok discount round-trip ticket costs about $873. But excess baggage charges are based on published first-class fares. The regular coach airline ticket between Tokyo and Bangkok costs $952.51, one way. Excess baggage charges are then $10.24 per 2.2 pounds. A passenger with 70 pounds of additional baggage that United carried free from the United States to Tokyo would be charged $326 each way to Bangkok and back, or a total of $652.

A few airlines have tried variations of normal excess baggage formulas. Pan Am has liberalized some of the limits on baggage size. At TWA, the weight limit has been slightly increased for coach passengers.

But the excess baggage problem, and airline-by-airline confusion, continues, with no easy solution apparent.

One travel agent suggested to his client that if he got to the airport and discovered he would be charged excess baggage, to have the passenger look for someone in line with just a few bags and ask if that passenger could check in his bag for him. While that seems a logical (and cost-saving) solution, it could cause big trouble in today’s heightened airport security environment.

One of the questions frequently asked of international passengers is if the bag they are checking is theirs, or if anyone has asked them to take an extra bag on their trip.

Thus, a necessary word of caution: If you try the travel agent’s ploy, you stand a reasonable chance of avoiding paying excess baggage charges. You also risk having your flight delayed while security officers rip apart your luggage.