Priority boarding vs the under-seat bag: what you get to carry

The free bag is one piece of 40 x 30 x 20 cm that goes under the seat in front of you, about 24 litres. It is included on every fare on both Ryanair and Wizz Air, and both carriers are currently more generous than the 40 x 30 x 15 cm industry minimum. Priority adds a second, larger bag: a 10 kg trolley of 55 x 40 x 20 cm on Ryanair, or 55 x 40 x 23 cm on Wizz Air, carried in the overhead locker. The important word is adds. You keep the small bag either way, so the question is never whether to have hand luggage, it is whether one bag is enough. For most two-night and three-night trips it is, if the coat and the heavier shoes are worn to the airport. For a week, or for anything involving a laptop, a camera and a change of shoes, the trolley is doing real work.

Both airlines charge per passenger and per one-way flight, so the price you see at booking is half the price of the trip. On Ryanair, Priority and 2 Cabin Bags runs €12.49 to €36 at booking, which is roughly €25 to €72 for a return. Adding it after the booking closes costs €19.99 to €45.50 each way instead. On Wizz Air, WIZZ Priority runs €10 to €60 online, so a return sits between €20 and €120 depending on the route and the date. Those are wide bands because both airlines price the product dynamically and say so. The advertised floor is not a planning number: a sample of more than 1,500 cabin bag prices found Ryanair's advertised price available on 0.3% of flights and Wizz Air's on 0.6%. Budget nearer the middle of the band and let a lower quote be the good surprise.

No, and this is the most common misreading of the product. Wizz Air states on its own page that WIZZ Priority gives no priority at security control, which is sold separately as Security Fast Track. What Priority buys on Wizz Air is three things sold together: the cabin trolley, boarding ahead of the main group, and a dedicated bag-drop desk. Ryanair's equivalent bundles priority boarding with the trolley and the free personal item in one line called Priority and 2 Cabin Bags. Neither product touches the queue that people find slowest at Sofia in July. If a faster security lane is what you are buying, look for the fast track product by name and price it separately. If overhead locker space is the worry, note that priority is what guarantees the trolley, and the under-seat bag never needs a locker at all.

On Ryanair, no. Priority and 2 Cabin Bags is capped per flight and sells out, and Ryanair publishes a help article telling sold-out passengers their only fallback is a 10 kg check-in bag, which has to be dropped at the desk before security. The cap is not published as a number, so there is no way to judge how close a flight is to it. That turns the choice into a booking decision rather than a later one, and Ryanair also prices it higher after booking. The under-seat bag has no such problem, because it is part of the fare rather than an add-on. On Wizz Air the trolley is bought as WIZZ Priority, and the SMART bundle wraps the same thing with seat selection. Wizz Air publishes no separate post-booking tier, so waiting there is drift of unknown size rather than a fixed penalty.

Both bags meet the same sizer. Ryanair states that a bag which does not fit is refused at the boarding gate or placed in the hold for €70 to €75. Wizz Air charges €55 to €65 for a cabin bag at the airport or gate, and its conditions of carriage add that the bag may then be carried as checked baggage in any case, so the fee is a penalty rather than an upgrade. The free bag is measured and, on Wizz Air, weighed to 10 kg; Ryanair publishes no weight limit for it and does not weigh it. One difference matters for the trolley: Wizz Air may place even a fully compliant trolley in the hold for operational reasons, free of charge, which means priority guarantees you may bring the bag rather than that it stays beside you. Keep documents and medication out of it either way.

Work backwards from the packing rather than forwards from the price. Three nights in Rome with one pair of shoes, rolled clothes and toiletries in small bottles fits the free bag, and the fare is then the whole cost of the trip. Six nights, a laptop for two days of work, or a trip where you plan to bring things home, does not fit, and trying to force it is how people end up repacking in a boarding queue. There is also a third answer that gets forgotten: on Ryanair, the 10 kg checked bag runs €10.49 to €44.99 at booking, so its band overlaps the trolley's. On a flight where priority is at the top of its range, the hold bag can be cheaper, and it removes the gate sizer from the trip entirely. It costs you the bag-drop queue and the wait at the belt.