You promote your Web site as “designed to provide answers to virtually any luggage question.” Are there a lot of luggage questions out there? If so, what are some of the questions you hear?
Luggage isn’t as simple as most people think, nor is the information always easy to find. In many cases, airline luggage policies differ ever so slightly especially with regards to the new checked bag fees and what you thought you knew ends up costing you at the check-in desk. During the time I’ve been building my site, many luggage questions have come ranging from obvious to completely bizarre. Some are fairly simple questions to most frequent flyers; some, however, are highly specific such as taking portable oxygen concentrators on flights or requiring needles in a carry-on to inject prescription medication. Most recently, someone asked me if he could take his Thanksgiving leftovers with him in a carry-on bag.
Did the idea for this site come from your background as an algebra teacher or as a traveler?
My personal experiences as a traveler convinced me that my Web site could offer a valuable service. I’ve lived in England, Australia and now in the United States over the last 10 years, so I’ve done my fair share of relocating. During this time, I’ve been caught out a few times by airlines and their ever changing policies including a very memorable incident in which I’d said goodbye to some of my friends at an Australian airport, only to chase them to the parking lot to ask for help as I’d unknowingly exceeded the baggage limit.
You mention that students’ luggage at the boarding school where you teach highlighted a gap in the industry. The kids regularly needed to fly with sports or music equipment or just had lots of heavy bags and would often incur a fortune in baggage charges and the stress of last-minute unpacking at the flight counter. How does your Web site help?
Preparation is a key ingredient to successful travel. My site can help all airline passengers to find the luggage information on a flight without having to digest several pages of an airline’s Web site in order to find the answer to a quick question. Basically, my site has done all the hard research work for you, so once you’ve entered your airline and travel route, we can tell you all the luggage information specific to that flight and disregard all the information that doesn’t apply to you. With all your required information quickly available in one place, it’s a far lesser chore to do the research that you should do before arriving at the airport because once you’ve left home for the airport, your options quickly decrease and the costs quickly rise.
At this point, do you see this Web site staying an avocation or could it someday become your primary source of income? What is the growth potential in a site like this?
Millions of people fly as airline passengers throughout the world on any given day and LuggageLimits.com has the potential to reach many if not all of them. As my site offers all of these people a fast, easy and free service, I’d only need a small percentage to achieve my targeted success and take on the project full time. I’d like to think that luggagelimits.com will establish itself and attract over several thousand hits per day within the next few years. During this time, the database of airlines will have grown much larger and hopefully the site’s search engine exposure will become much greater.
Your site recently cracked 101 airlines. How many airlines currently serve the U.S.?
A great number of foreign international airlines service the U.S that still await inclusion into the LuggageLimits database. In time, I plan to add 300 airlines. The next hurdle will be to make this information applicable to as many nations as possible by providing language options.
