I know that checking bags stinks. I avoid it like the plague. Not only do you increasingly pay for the privilege, but the risk of the airline losing your bag is not to be ruled out. But UPS’ solution — their new luggage box — isn’t much help.

The company is touting it as the answer to runaway airline baggage fees, with the added bonus of direct-to-destination shipping. You take the packed box to a UPS Store, pay your fees, and off you go.

But that’s just it: you pay your fees. Hefty, heft fees.

For starters, you pay for the box itself. Granted, it’s intended to be reusable, so it’s perhaps a bit sturdier than your regular brown cardboard box. But it’s still a box. And it costs $12.95 for the small box or $17.95 for the larger one. And that’s if you can find it — not every UPS store has it, so you may need to order it from the company, and pay shipping.

Then there’s the cost to ship the box itself:

To ship the small size box at a maximum weight of 55 pounds between Los Angeles and New York on UPS’s ground network would cost about $66, including the price of the box, Rosenberg said. It would take about four days to get there. The large box would ship for about $92, she said. Delta currently charges $25 for one bag weighing less than 50 pounds that is checked in at the airport.

55 lbs. is frankly an odd amount to be using as a metric, since airlines in the US typically run up to 50 lbs. I guess that makes the UPS option look better?

In any case, paying $25 for a bag that travels with you, and that doesn’t take four days to get to its destination, starts to look pretty good. Sure, you have to carry the bag to the hotel or car. But is that worth $75 or so?

Pass me a tinfoil hat, but the UPS offering is so bad, it’s almost as if the airlines put them up to it, to make the airlines’ checked baggage fee look like a good deal.