British Airways complaint: Exorbitant excess luggage charge

I flew with my husband and 13-year old daughter on March 7th from Heathrow back to Munich airport. We had paid full fares in order to avail of the 23kg luggage allowance per person. My daughter had a smaller suitcase and my husband and I slightly larger ones.

On the journey back – after a week’s stay in London, we had put most of our luggage in the bigger suitcases and left only the things we needed for our final night’s stay in my daughter’s smaller suitcase. So one of the cases was several kilos overweight, when we checked in, although our overall weight was still under the total weight allowance we had for the three of us (ie. 23kg x 3 69kg).

We were charged a huge bill of 65 GBP at check-in due to the one overweight case, as we were not fit to completely repack and redistribute our luggage weight in the middle of the busy Monday-morning airport, for our 7 am flight back to Munich (after about 3 hours’ sleep)!

I am disgusted to have been charged this exorbitant fee and cannot understand why some leniency is allowed under such circumstances, when the overall weight is not exceeded.