Luggage Shipping Guide

Image: Walter Hodges

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My father, a shoe retailer who never took an out-of-town business trip, nevertheless taught me a practical lesson about life on the road: You get what you pay for—and anything a supplier throws in for free probably isn’t worth buying when it charges for it.

The old man pretty much nailed the airlines on their current strategy of checked luggage. 

As we discussed last fall, the government says that airlines are “mishandling” checked bags at a record clip. That’s bad enough when they throw in the service for free. But along with their luggage-­handling inefficiency comes a barrage of niggling new rules and fees: They have reduced the free allowance to two bags from three; slashed the maximum weight of the bags to 50 pounds from 70; begun charging for curbside check-in; and have imposed hefty surcharges of as much as $100 whenever you check an extra (or extra-heavy) bag. On Monday, United Airlines went even further: Most travelers on the nation’s second-largest airline will now be permitted only one free checked bag, not two. And some carriers (most notably, Spirit and Skybus) have reached the final frontier: They have unbundled luggage handling from the ticket price and charge for any bag you deign to transport inside the bellies of their aircraft.

Is there an alternative to paying the airlines to do a lousy job of handing checked bags? Sure. You can pay a third party to do it. They will charge more—okay, a lot more—but they also are a lot more reliable and offer a lot more service.

The new-wave, boutique-style luggage shippers—and old reliables like FedEx and U.P.S.—also offer something that the airlines never could: freedom from the schlep. They’ll come to your home or office, gather your bags, and make them appear at your final destination. You go to the airport without having to maneuver your gear into a car or a cab. You bypass the long lines at baggage check-in. You skip the even longer wait at the baggage carousel. And you arrive at your hotel or resort like a visiting head of state, blissfully free of physical encumbrance.

It’s the best thing I’ve ever experienced on the road. Moving from place to place without checked bags or even a carry-on stuffed with clothes is sybaritic. And once you run through airports and hotel lobbies without bags, you’ll never want to go back to carrying those leaden weights.

Who Does It
You have two stark choices when you want to free yourself from your bags: Give them to U.P.S., FedEx, and other traditional shippers, or put yourself in the hands of the new generation of specialty services such as Luggage Forward, Sports Express, Luggage Concierge, and the Luggage Club.

The traditional courier services have the benefit of familiarity. We all know them, we have their paper­work around our offices, and their pick-up and delivery people visit several times a day. And we trust them because they have a better track record than the airlines.

The drawback: They really don’t want to be in the luggage-­shipping business. “We prefer people ship their bags through the luggage firms,” a U.P.S. spokesman told me recently. And the luggage-shipping components of their businesses are so small—U.P.S. is a $47 billion company, for ­example—that the courier firms don’t offer any special services or tracking facilities for travelers who are sending bags, not boxes.

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