Baggage fee charges skyrocket past three years

Posted at 2:56 PM on November 29, 2011 by Paul Tosto
Filed under: Economy

Anyone who's flown the past few years knows bag fees have blossomed. But I didn't realize how much we've paid until I looked at the data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Fees collected jumped more than seven-fold between 2007 and 2010, from about about $465 million to nearly $3.4 billion.

Click on the charts to see the data.

In that same period, the number of domestic passengers on U.S. carriers fell by about 50 million.