I am saying this as clearly as possible: Never book flights through Booking.com. And if you can avoid it, avoid Vueling too.
I recently booked a flight from Zurich to Barcelona through Booking.com, operated by Vueling, and what followed was the kind of travel nonsense that makes you wonder why anyone still tolerates this industry’s uniquely polished form of dysfunction.
Here is the issue: When I booked the ticket, it completely slipped past me that Vueling’s default fare does not include normal cabin baggage. Not actual hand luggage. Not the standard carry-on suitcase that fits in the overhead bin (22 x 14 x 9 inches or 55 x 35 x 23 cm) and that any reasonable person on a European flight would assume is part of the deal. No. What is apparently included by default is just a small personal item that has to fit under the seat in front of you.
Now, to be fair, it is entirely possible that this was stated somewhere in the booking flow. I am not claiming it was hidden in a secret bunker beneath the website. Maybe it was there. Maybe I overlooked it.
But that is exactly the point. I simply did not expect that a normal European short-haul fare would exclude what I consider completely standard cabin baggage. In all my travel experience, that is not what I regard as normal practice. So yes, perhaps I missed it. But I missed it because it was obviously not made clear enough to break through a perfectly reasonable expectation.
And if your baggage policy deviates from what most passengers would consider standard, then “technically mentioned somewhere” is not good enough. That is not transparency. That is not customer-friendly design. That is just plausible deniability with a booking engine attached.
There should be a big, impossible-to-miss warning saying:
Attention: This fare does NOT include standard cabin baggage for the overhead compartment!
Not hidden in some collapsed fare detail. Not buried in a swamp of menus, footnotes, and half-visible labels. If you are stripping out something most people consider standard, you do not get to whisper it and then blame the customer for not hearing you.
And what makes this even more ridiculous is that I am not one of those passengers trying to game the baggage rules. I travel with one single standard cabin bag. One. Not four. Not a carry-on, a backpack, a shopping bag, a laptop case, and some duty-free nonsense dangling from my wrist like a traveling Christmas tree, like I am trying to smuggle a branch office onto the aircraft. Just one proper carry-on.
In fact, I use an official cabin bag with Lufthansa branding that fits standard carry-on dimensions, including stricter ones. I also weigh it at home like a complete baggage nerd to make sure I stay below the eight-kilo limit (17.5 lbs). I do not cheat. I do not sneak extra pieces on board. I do not try to bend the rules and then act surprised at the gate. I travel properly, neatly, and within the stated limits.
So I was not trying to pull a fast one. I was doing exactly what a disciplined passenger is supposed to do, and I still got blindsided by a fare model that treats normal cabin baggage like some sort of decadent luxury item. That is what irritated me so much. Not just the policy itself, but the fact that it catches a perfectly ordinary, compliant traveler off guard.
And that brings me to the second farce:
Booking.com after the booking
Once the booking is made, good luck finding anything useful. The whole thing turns into a digital scavenger hunt through vague menus, missing details, and an astonishing lack of practical clarity. I tried to review the booking and confirm the baggage situation properly, and it was absurdly difficult to find the relevant detail in any usable way.
That is one of the things I am criticizing most about Booking.com here. Even if the information was technically present somewhere during the original booking flow, the platform does a terrible job of making critical details visible after the booking. And that matters. Because if I had been able to clearly see it earlier, before check-in, I might still have had time to correct it properly. Instead, the whole thing became obvious only at a point where departure was already close, options were worse, and the situation was far harder to fix.
Then comes the check-in circus…
Because naturally, you cannot just check in like a normal person using your own email address. No. Booking.com inserts itself into the process with some assigned proxy-email nonsense, so you have to log into the airline’s system using a separate Booking.com-generated email address and the booking reference. Because apparently booking a short European flight should feel like recovering access to a badly configured enterprise test account.
Only at that stage, during check-in, did the problem become properly obvious: You do not have normal cabin baggage.
Fine, I thought. Irritating, but fixable. I will just add the normal cabin bag option and move on.
Except no. That would have required a functioning customer experience. Because I do not want to check luggage into the hold. I have a tight onward schedule and I do not have time to stand around at baggage claim waiting for my suitcase to emerge from the underworld while the clock runs down. I needed normal cabin baggage. That was the entire point.
So I tried support.
First the usual swamp of chats, chatbots, delays, and dead ends. Then eventually, after enough digital misery, I actually got connected to what was presented as an agent on both sides, both with Vueling and with Booking.com. Human or AI wearing a name tag, who even knows anymore..? In any case, I explained the problem clearly. And neither of them could help.
Vueling’s answer was essentially this: Sorry, that baggage option is no longer available. Which, translated into plain English, means: Check the bag into the hold or go to hell.
Booking.com’s answer was no better. They hid behind the usual contractual shrug: Sorry, not our responsibility, we are not in charge of the airline’s baggage policy. And formally, perhaps that is true. But that also misses the point entirely. What I am criticizing about Booking.com is not that it invented Vueling’s luggage rules. It is that the whole booking and post-booking experience is so badly structured, so unclear, and so unhelpful that by the time you realize you have a problem, it is often too late to solve it properly. That is exactly where a booking platform should add value. Instead, it adds friction, confusion, and a support structure that exists mostly to explain why nothing can be done.
That is what makes it so infuriating. I was not demanding some absurd exception. I was not asking for special treatment. I was simply trying to correct something that had not been made clear enough in practice, and I was trying to do so before the flight. And what was the practical result? No pragmatic help. No real solution. No meaningful flexibility. Just two companies, each in their own way, saying: Not our problem.
So what is the customer supposed to do at that point? Buy a new smaller bag for one flight? Accept being forced to check in luggage they explicitly do not want to check in? Rebook with a different airline at the last minute at a ridiculous price because the original setup turned out to be a trap? That is not a functioning travel experience. That is a bureaucratic ambush.
So here is the conclusion:
Booking.com for flights is a mess.
Not because every individual screen is necessarily false, but because the overall experience is opaque, fragmented, and practically useless the moment something goes even slightly wrong.
And Vueling does itself no favors by treating standard cabin baggage like an optional indulgence and then offering no meaningful path to fix the problem later.
Maybe the information was somewhere. Fine. I am willing to concede that. But if a passenger traveling with one single compliant cabin bag, within the weight limit, within standard dimensions, and with no intention of gaming the rules can still end up trapped like this, then the process is bad. The customer experience is bad. And the support behind it is bad. That is the real issue.
So my verdict is clear: Booking.com for flights? Not recommended.
And Vueling? Also not recommended.
Because travel is stressful enough without turning one perfectly standard cabin bag into an administrative hostage situation.
As always, just my 5 cents.
//Alex
alexreusch 