Two things in this entry. One is a change at an airline. The other is a mistake of ours that the first one exposed.
airBaltic added a fare below its cheapest fare
On 6 May 2026 airBaltic introduced Economy MINI, a new entry-level ticket that sits below the fare that used to be its cheapest. Its ticket types are now Economy MINI, BASIC, CLASSIC and FLEX, plus Business.
MINI includes one personal item, 40 × 30 × 15 cm, 8 kg. That is all: no cabin bag, no checked bag. The full cabin bag (55 × 40 × 23 cm, 8 kg for both pieces together) starts at Economy BASIC, and a checked bag at Economy CLASSIC. The five older ticket types all keep a cabin suitcase, so MINI is a genuinely new bottom rung rather than a rename.
It gives you less than Ryanair does — which is the part worth knowing
This is the detail that prompted the whole review, and it runs against the intuition that a hybrid carrier is more generous than an ultra-low-cost one. airBaltic’s MINI item is 40 × 30 × 15 cm. Ryanair’s free small bag, on every fare, has been 40 × 30 × 20 cm since September 2025. Same footprint, five centimetres shallower — about 18 litres against 24, roughly a quarter less space.
Practically: a bag packed to fit Ryanair’s gate sizer may not fit airBaltic’s on a MINI ticket. Move up one rung and it reverses — Economy BASIC includes the overhead cabin bag that Ryanair charges for.
The catch that decides what you can actually pack
Economy MINI is sold only through airBaltic’s own website, app and call centre — not through online travel agents or the global distribution systems. So the fare you reach through a comparison site or an agent normally starts at Economy BASIC, cabin bag included. Before you pack to the smaller allowance, check which fare name is on your booking. We have written that caveat onto every page we touched, because a correction that stops at “airBaltic gives you no cabin bag” would be wrong in the other direction.
What we had wrong
Rather more than we would like. Nine of our airline comparison pages and two route pages said airBaltic’s entry fare was called “Light” and included a cabin bag. airBaltic has never sold a fare called Light. On the comparison pages the cause is traced: a single wrong value in our own airline database recorded airBaltic’s standard fare as “Light”, and the fare-name sentence on those pages is generated from that field, so one bad entry seeded the same error on all nine. The two route pages are not generated from it, and how the same wrong name reached them we do not know. Nor do we know how “Light” got into the field to begin with — most, though not all, of the airlines involved do sell a fare with “Light” in its name, which is a plausible route for the mix-up, but we are not going to present a guess as a finding.
Our baggage guide also described the cheapest fare as a “Green” bundle and claimed Green and Economy MINI “map to the same allowances”. They do not, and Green appears on none of airBaltic’s current ticket-type, fare-conditions or baggage pages. Separately, the rule table behind our baggage checker carried an under-seat size of 42 × 32 × 18 cm — not an airBaltic figure in any version we can find, and, awkwardly, larger than Ryanair’s, which is the exact opposite of the truth.
Updated: airBaltic baggage allowance, airBaltic vs Ryanair, and the airBaltic comparisons against Lufthansa, SAS, Finnair, Norwegian, Air France, KLM, Brussels Airlines, Austrian and Aegean, plus three route pages — Riga to Amsterdam and Riga to Paris, which named the phantom Light fare, and Riga to Vilnius, which promised a cabin bag on the cheapest fare without naming one — fourteen pages in all, plus the baggage checker’s data and the baggage rules our own publishing pipeline reads.
And a correction to something we said about the EU
While writing the comparison above we described 40 × 30 × 15 cm as the “EU-mandated minimum” personal-item size. That is wrong, and it had been sitting in our Ryanair guide for months before it spread.
What is actually true: EU member states agreed that minimum on 5 June 2025, and Airlines for Europe announced on 2 July 2025 that its member airlines had adopted it, rolling it out by the end of the 2025 summer season. It is an industry commitment, not a law in force. The wider EU proposal to make cabin bags free is a European Parliament position that the Council rejected; it was still in conciliation in mid-2026 and has not become law. There is no “legal floor” for us to have described. Corrected on the Ryanair baggage guide and on both airBaltic pages.
How this log works
Every entry follows the same discipline: a claim is verified against a primary source — here, airBaltic’s own ticket-type and cabin-baggage pages, and Airlines for Europe’s own announcement, never a news aggregator — then every affected page is updated in one sweep, then the live pages are re-checked to zero stale claims. That last step is not a formality: our first sweep of this change reported itself clean while seven pages still carried the old claim in a second copy of their FAQ, and a third sweep found more behind escaped quotation marks. Date stamps on our guides reflect real re-verification, never cosmetic bumping — which is why the Ryanair guide’s verified-on date has not moved: we corrected one claim on it, we did not re-verify the airline’s whole policy.