My wife and I both have an Orucase Airport Ninja. We have taken several trips and have not been charged for a bike. I have airline status and an airline credit card that gets me a free bag and it’s worked fine for that. We typically fly Delta and their partners (KLM in the EU). The fact that the bike goes as regular luggage, when Delta normally charges $150 for a bike means we’ve paid for our cases easily.

They move well through the airport. We arrive and depart throught the same airport typically, so we make arrangments with our first night hotel to leave our cases there during the trip. If I wasn’t arriving and departing through the same airport, I’d just work with a hotel to ship the bag ahead to my next destination for departure. Would be simple to set that all up ahead of time. Shipping the bag would be pretty cheap and a one time charge.

The downside is that you have to dissassemble your bike to a fair degree - remove wheels, fork, handlebars, pedals, unbolt and secure rear derailleur. Once you have it down, I can re-assemble two bikes in an hour. Takes me just over 20 minutes a bike if you think about it and come up with a good system.

Love these cases. We now fly with our bikes whenever we travel by air.

https://www.orucase.com/

Based on the quote you’ve gotten, you’d pay for this case before you ever got on the airplane.

The other alternative is you could make a cardboard “Orucase” in the same shape and ship that as luggage too. But I’d bet you’d stand a higher risk of getting charged.

Pretty much every case - hard or soft - has panels that are about the same toughness in preventing a point pressure from pushing against the frame. That would be "pressure" in the normal baggage handling sense, of course. If a truck backs into your case, if it falls off the baggage cart and gets run over, if it gets jammed in a conveyer or lift, all bets are off no matter what because those are forces produced by heavy equipment that is designed to move high volumes of tonnage quickly and if it is that force against your case, the case loses and it doesn't matter what the case is made from.

I'll also say that that sort of severe damage is becoming much more rare than it used to be. We've traveled worldwide with both skis and bikes in cases and have had a lot more success than failure (and it's improved over the years). With our current cases, the bikes go through the normal baggage scheme (no special handling required) and that seems to work the best. Where trouble happens, IMHO, is when you get out of that flow and the bag requires special handling and transport. That's when things fall off of trucks, protruding items get smashed into loading docks, and things get run over. Spends some time watching how baggage gets handled at an airport and I think you'll see what I mean. They've had to create baggage handling flows that handle cheap pink "snoopy" bags and a compact bike case is way more robust than that.

I will say this though - almost *any* bike case is better than a cardboard box. That said, thousands maybe millions of bikes are shipped every year in cardboard boxes without incident. That's how they come packaged to your LBS. But every one of those has protectors in the dropouts and caps over the wheel hubs - those pieces definitely make a difference.

We're big fans of our Orucase Airport Ninjas and are considered "soft" cases but which have been flawless in protecting our bikes and which we have yet to ever be charged an airline bike charge which on Delta/KLM is $150 each way. These bags have heavy padding around the circumference of the bag and dual sheets of dense plastic that provide similar structural rigidity to the bag as in a hard case. That's pretty typical in a lot of soft bags too. What's unique about the Orucases is that they are very close to the airline size spec without having to have a frame that has couplers and they are much lighter than most other bike cases. They just happily ride down the conveyors and up into the aircraft without fuss.

We also have the roll aboard bags that have metal frames (same ones a lot of aircrew use). I've used them for the many years when I traveled for business and they are brutishly tough. We were able to fashion a sling arrangement with the Orucase straps so the bikes ride on the luggage hook on our wheelies which makes them pretty easy to manage in airports, trains, and buses and not need baggage carts. I'm not sure I'd try that with just any wheelie, but the proof of that is left to the reader, I guess. These work great for that. On our last trip, we used them to wheel our bike cases about a half mile from the bus station to our hotel as well as through the airports. Worked great and that included carrying the duffel I mentioned above. Again, these wheelie carryon bags are beyond tough.

Agree and I think you'll be quite happy with those cases. I think you'll find that the more compact shape is pretty handy in airports and airport buses. Bear in mind, if the airline goes at your case with a forklift as above, the case - any case - loses every time. If you want to know more about how we do it, just PM me.

So there's always added risk over not traveling with the bike. That said, like most serious cyclists, we're pretty picky about the bikes we ride and how they fit. It's hard to duplicate that on a rental bike and there's nothing like riding your own favorite bike.

But if you did have to rent a bike, if you have the measurements written down, you should be able to get close and at least salvage the trip. Knock on wood - it won't be a problem but luck is when opportunity meets preparation, as the saying goes. You need the height of handlebars to the ground, the height of your saddle to the ground, the distance from the center of your seat post to the center of your handlebars, the distance from the nose of your seat to the handlebars, and the angle of your seat relative to the ground. Make sure the wheels are level - you may have to adjust for the ground not being level. Account for differences in ground height if you have fatter or narrower tires from when you did your measurement. That should get you pretty close. There are some great smartphone apps to get you the equivalent of a bubble level so that and a tape measure are all you need. Incidentally, nice to have if you forget to mark things like seatpost height or it rubs off.

Where are you going on your trip?

I guess that pretty much supports what I believe to be the case (although ascribing reason to airlines is not necessarily a reasonable expectation). As long as you stay in their luggage handling flow which is what it sounds like what they wanted you to do in your trip from Spain, you should be fairly safe with an expectation that things will work out ok. Some of that depends on the airline and how they agree to handle bikes. Some of that depends on the actual airport and it's baggage handling infrastructure (airlines can only use what is there). The rest is on you with your case/box and how well you pack it. No matter what though, hard to not worry about any luggage that's not carryon. Delta does have a pretty cool system now though where you can tell where your bag is real time. So while you're sitting in your seat and they're loading baggage, you can tell that your bag made it on the plane with you. That's pretty comforting in it's own right.

J.

I have a friend who could use one of those! Thanks for the link.

glad to help. Hope it works for them as well as it has for us.

wow - great to have family and friends in places like that!