Business

How has Ryanair changed its cabin baggage rule – and will other airlines do it too? | Ryanair

Published

3 days ago

July 5, 2025

For all but the most seasoned travellers the metal bag sizers used by budget airlines have become an instrument of fear because of the heavy financial penalty incurred if hand baggage is too big to fit.

But as the summer holiday season gets under way there is some good news for those who struggle to travel light: Ryanair has announced it is increasing the size of the small “personal” bag you can take in the cabin for free by 20%.

This sounds unusually generous of Ryanair – is it?

Yes. But it comes as airlines fall into line behind a new EU guaranteed bag size of 40cm by 30cm by 15cm. The current dimensions of the Ryanair free carry-on limit are 40cm by 25cm by 20cm – below the EU rule. It is increasing them to 40cm by 30cm by 20cm.

Ryanair trumpets this is “bigger than the EU standard”. It says the change “will be implemented over the coming weeks, as our airport bag sizers are adjusted”.

Ryanair passengers can add a larger cabin bag to a flight booking for £6 to £36 by buying a priority package. Photograph: Wiskerke/Alamy

The size change represents a 20% increase in volume and means Ryanair will be accepting free bags one-third bigger than the new EU minimum.

But that is the only aspect of Ryanair’s baggage policy that is changing. If you get it wrong and a gate check reveals the bag is oversized you will pay a fee of £60. A larger cabin bag can be added to a flight booking for £6 to £36 depending on the route but, again, if it is deemed too large at the airport it will cost £75 to stow.

Will other airlines change their luggage rules, too?

Some won’t have do anything. Rival budget airline easyJet, for example, already allows a more generous free underseat bag. Wizz Air’s current free bag policy is the same as the one that Ryanair is moving to.

The airline association Airlines for Europe (A4E) says its 28 members have started applying the bag dimensions which were agreed by EU transport ministers last month.

“This will bring more clarity to passengers across Europe,” says its managing director, Ourania Georgoutsakou. “From city-hoppers to family travellers, everyone will benefit from the same clear rule across our members’ networks.”

Standardising cabin-bag rules has been on the Brussels agenda for years with the decision to settle on a size enabling frequent travellers to buy one piece of luggage that will be accepted by multiple airlines.

All A4E airlines will be following the bag rule by the end of the 2025 summer season, it says, adding that “carriers will continue to permit larger personal items at their discretion”.

Aren’t hand baggage fees being abolished anyway?

Not yet, but they could be. European consumer groups are calling on EU lawmakers to investigate budget airlines for “exploiting consumers” by charging for hand luggage.

In May, BEUC, an umbrella group for 44 consumer organisations, called for Brussels to investigate seven airlines, including Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air for this. BEUC director general Agustín Reyna said the airlines were “ignoring the EU top court who ruled that charging [for] reasonably sized hand baggage is illegal”.

Wizz Air is following other airlines in being investigated in Spain for charging passengers for hand luggage and seat reservations. Photograph: Marek Slusarczyk/Alamy

The organisation was referring to a EU court of justice ruling in 2014 that said the “carriage of hand baggage cannot be made subject to a price supplement, provided that it meets reasonable requirements in terms of its weight and dimensions”.

In the meantime, Spain has become a battleground for the issue. Last year, its consumer affairs ministry fined five carriers, including Ryanair, a total of €179m (£150m) for charging passengers for hand luggage and seat reservations. Now low-cost carrier Wizz Air is being investigated, too.

Will charges be banned?

Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, says no. He is dismissive of the Spanish effort, recently telling the Guardian the country has a “mad minister who’s decided that as General Franco passed some law 30 years before Spain joined the EU, passengers are free to bring as much baggage as they want.”

A Spanish court has now temporarily suspended the fines on three of the airlines (including Ryanair) while the matter is under judicial review, after a legal challenge.

To complicate matters further, last month the transport committee of the European parliament voted to give passengers the right to an extra piece of free hand luggage weighing up to 7kg.

Under the new rule, travellers could bring one cabin bag measuring up to 100cm (based on the sum of the dimensions) on board their flight, as well a personal bag, at no additional cost. (MEPs also want children under 12 years old to be seated next to their accompanying passenger free of charge.)

The proposed law requires approval from 55% of EU member states, but if adopted after the negotiations due to start this month, would extend to all flights within the EU, as well as routes to and from the EU.

The airline industry is predictably opposed, stating that the cost of the bag will be folded into overall prices, pushing up fares.

“Europe’s airline market is built on choice,” Georgoutsakou says. “Forcing a mandatory trolley bag strips passengers of that choice and obliges passengers to pay for services they may not want or need. What’s next? Mandatory popcorn and drinks as part of your cinema ticket?

“The European parliament should let travellers decide what services they want, what services they pay for and, importantly, what services they don’t,” she says.

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Business

Can AI run a successful vending business? An AI startup tested it out

Published

59 minutes ago

July 7, 2025

Linda Becker

Because AI isn’t (yet) able to physically restock the machine, the AI model could email company employees who handled such tasks. Beyond that, however, the AI model, dubbed Claudius for the experiment, was tasked with many of the responsibilities of a traditional operator, including selecting and maintaining inventory, setting prices and maximizing profit.

The upshot: “If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” the company wrote in its blog.

The experiment showed that while the AI model was effective at tasks such as identifying suppliers, adapting to users’ requests and “jailbreak resistance,” as Anthropic employees tried to trick Claudius into stock sensitive items, Claudius failed as a convenience service operator because it ignored profitable opportunities, instructed customers to make payments at a Venmo address it had imagined (instead of the one created), sold products at a loss, offered excessive discounts and mismanaged inventory.

Although version one of Project Vend wasn’t successful at the bottom line, Anthropic predicts that AI middle managers will come to pass. “It’s worth remembering that the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases,” the company wrote in its blog.

Read the full story here.

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Business

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

The Editors

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

PR Newswire

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025

Globant is partnering with Suntory Global Spirits to build a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent
With the Agent, Suntory Global Spirits employees can access data insights and self-service intelligence, speeding up decision-making across product development, marketing, sales and strategy

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native company focused on reinventing businesses through innovative technology solutions, today announced a reinvention partnership with Suntory Global Spirits, the world leader in premium spirits, to build and deploy a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent. By compressing days of work into seconds and supporting real-time decision-making for sales, marketing, and strategy, Globant’s Commercial Insights Agent is transforming operations for the beverage company.

The AI-powered agent can interpret complex business questions across dashboards, reports, and unstructured documentation for Suntory Global Spirits, eliminating the need for manual insight requests. By automating insight retrieval, the Commercial Insights Agent reduces operating costs tied to traditional business intelligence workflows and significantly reduces time-to-action. What once required multiple cycles of back-and-forth between business and analytics teams can now be executed on demand, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.

“Our work with Suntory Global Spirits exemplifies how visionary companies can harness the power of agentic and generative AI to fundamentally transform the way they operate,” said Santiago Noziglia, Retail, CPG and Automotive AI Studio CEO at Globant. “The Commercial Insights Agent is more than a productivity tool; it’s a strategic enabler that redefines how teams access knowledge, make decisions, and unlock growth. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when building an AI-powered enterprise.”

Additional benefits of the Commercial Insights Agent include:

Self-serve decision support at scale: Teams at Suntory Global Spirits, especially across marketing, sales and product management, can independently access data insights, ask questions, or generate reports without bottlenecks or dependencies on other teams.
Contextual recommendations powered by GenAI: The Commercial Insights Agent is trained on internal data to provide contextual GenAI recommendations that speed up decision-making.
AI Agent foundation: The Commercial Insights Agent is just the beginning for Suntory Global Spirits, which can now use the agent as a template for new use cases across brand planning, commercial forecasting and innovation pipelines.

To learn more about Globant’s AI-powered tools, visit https://www.globant.com/enterprise-ai.

About Globant

At Globant, we create the digitally-native products that people love. We bridge the gap between businesses and consumers through technology and creativity, leveraging our expertise in AI. We dare to digitally transform organizations and strive to delight their customers.

We have more than 31,100 employees and are present in 36 countries across 5 continents, working for companies like Google, Electronic Arts, and Santander, among others.
We were named a Worldwide Leader in AI Services (2023) and a Worldwide Leader in Media Consultation, Integration, and Business Operations Cloud Service Providers (2024) by IDC MarketScape report.
We are the fastest-growing IT brand and the 5th strongest IT brand globally (2024), according to Brand Finance.
We were featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
We are active members of The Green Software Foundation (GSF) and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

Contact: pr@globant.com
Sign up to get first dibs on press news and updates.
For more information, visit www.globant.com.

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Business

AI Company Buys Bitcoin Miner in $9 Billion Deal to Expand Data Power

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

CPI

AI cloud provider CoreWeave announced it will acquire bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $9 billion, according to Reuters.

As AI workloads continue to surge, energy-hungry data centers have become a crucial asset. Firms like CoreWeave, which began as a crypto miner and later transitioned into AI infrastructure, are aggressively expanding their access to power and physical computing capacity. Per Reuters, the acquisition will give CoreWeave control of Core Scientific’s 1.3 gigawatts of contracted power and its development pipeline, a major boost in the race to scale AI operations.

Under the terms of the deal, Core Scientific shareholders will receive 0.1235 shares of newly issued CoreWeave stock for each Core Scientific share they hold. The offer values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share—a 66% premium over the stock’s price before deal discussions became public in late June, Reuters noted.

Despite the premium, Core Scientific’s stock dropped 22% in early trading Monday, while CoreWeave, which is backed by Nvidia, saw its shares decline 4.5%.

The acquisition is expected to help CoreWeave reduce more than $10 billion in projected future lease expenses tied to current site agreements over the next 12 years. The move not only expands CoreWeave’s energy footprint but also signals a broader trend of bitcoin miners diversifying into AI to remain viable in a rapidly shifting tech landscape.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC (high-performance computing) workloads at scale,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, in a statement released alongside the announcement.

Industry analysts see the transaction as a potential inflection point. Gautam Chhugani of Bernstein told Reuters the deal could become a blueprint for other miners looking to reposition themselves in the AI economy. Power access, he emphasized, remains the chief bottleneck for the expansion of AI-focused data centers.

Founded in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation, CoreWeave exited the crypto mining business following Ethereum’s 2022 shift to a proof-of-stake model, which dramatically reduced miner incentives. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, with revenue surging more than eightfold last year, per its IPO filing.

Source: Reuters

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