WestJet baggage fees go up again

This is a low-dollar, high-frequency pricing move that matters more for behavior than for headline revenue. The immediate winner is the carrier’s unit economics, but the second-order effect is demand leakage at the margin: leisure travelers with elastic budgets will increasingly bundle, shift to premium bundles, or simply choose competitors with lower a la carte friction. That tends to favor network carriers with stronger loyalty ecosystems and better ancillary attach rates, while smaller discounters face a harder choice between matching price increases or losing price-sensitive traffic.

The bigger signal is not the fee itself but the willingness to keep pushing ancillary pricing despite consumer fatigue. That usually works best until load factors soften, at which point ancillary gains can be overwhelmed by lower base fares and weaker conversion. In the next 1-2 quarters, watch for a split between travelers booking short-haul leisure trips and those with business or time-sensitive demand; the former will be more price sensitive, making weekend and family travel the first place where elasticity shows up.

From a supply-chain lens, this is mildly inflationary for household travel budgets but not enough on its own to materially change macro demand. The contrarian risk is that the market overreads the headline and assumes broad consumer deterioration; in reality, fee hikes often reflect confidence in demand resilience and can be a sign management is prioritizing yield over volume. If competitors do not follow within weeks, the move could backfire by nudging comparison shopping and increasing share migration to whichever carrier is perceived as the least punitive on total trip cost.