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Spirit Lowers Baggage Weight Allowance, Adds Fee

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Spirit Airlines keeps finding new ways to suck its customers dry. The airline has bucked the industry standard, lowering its checked bag weight allowance from 50 to 40 pounds.

Passengers will now pay a $25 surcharge for bags between 41 and 50 pounds. Spirit’s overweight bag policy remains otherwise unchanged, with bags between 51 and 75 pounds costing an extra $50, and bags between 71 and 100 pounds ringing up an extra $100.

Spirit is truly an outlier with its new policy, as every other major U.S. carrier, with the exception of Allegiant, allows passengers to check bags weighing up to 50 pounds with no overweight surcharge. Allegiant allows bags up to 49 pounds.

Check out our updated Ultimate Guide to Airline Fees to get all the major fees from all the major carriers, including Spirit’s new overweight bag surcharge. Kudos to our friends at Airfarewatchdog, who alerted us to the change via Twitter.

Readers, do you think 40 pounds is too low a threshold for checked bags?

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