The age old debate that never even crossed your mind, should you ship a bag to your destination?
Shipping a bag never even really occurred to me before until I was basically taking two trips in one! We are almost always “carry on only” travelers. My husband and I were departing to hike the Tour Du Mont Blanc in the Italian, French, and Swiss alps for 9 days. Then we were hopping a plane from Geneva, Switzerland to Malta to spend a week on the island. These were clearly two completely different trips in one and we were struggling with how in the world we could pack for this.
On the Tour du Mont Blanc your bag is transported from mountain hut to mountain hut for you. However, your bag must be below a certain weight, so we certainly couldn’t be hauling around a week’s worth of summer vacation to Malta clothes with us on the hike. We were nervous about connecting flights and transfers and losing baggage along the way. Airlines have been unpredictable, strikes in Europe happen a little too regularly and we wanted all of our baggage to make it on our trip.
I looked into a storing the bag at the Geneva airport. I looked into storing the bag at our first/last hotel of our hike. But as costs added up and logistics made it seem impossible, I hit up google and typed in “can you ship a bag”. Shockingly this was SO MUCH EASIER than I ever would have imagined.
We started looking into companies that offered this service. We asked friends and family and no one had ever used a baggage shipping service before so we were a bit nervous. We read countless reviews and ended up going with “mybaggage” and it was an excellent choice. We scheduled to have our bag picked up a few days before leaving for our trip. Prior to the pick up they gave you all information needed for customs. They sent all labels you would need and you print and label your bag prior to their arrival. They picked the bag up directly from our house. We scheduled to have it delivered to our hotel in Malta and we prepared the hotel for its arrival.
The cost to ship the bag from Philadelphia to Malta (which is an island) was $228 dollars. The peace of mind for not having to worry about dragging that bag around the world prior to our trip was priceless. We also would have had to take the bag from PHL-LHR-GEN and then from GEN-MLA. The fees we likely would have racked up and the stress from carrying the bag everywhere would have been much more than the 228 we paid to have the bag shipped.
The bag was tracked efficiently and we knew where it was at all times. Anytime I clicked into my account I could see exactly where it was. It arrived in Malta early and safely and I was so thankful that we figured out how to use this service. The website is clear and easy to use and was very descriptive every step of the way.
Now if you are ever thinking to yourself that shipping a bag might be of interest…a real person can tell you that we used “mybaggage” and it worked out wonderfully. I have not yet attempted this again or with another company but I would now be much more open to giving it a shot. There are so many reasons to not want to haul your bag through airports, onto and off planes, etc. This service makes traveling with a larger bag so much easier and in my opinion less stressful.
Other reasons I can think of that might be good for bag shipping.
-You might just want to. It is easy and you don’t have to haul a bag all around the airport etc.
-Excess baggage or large bags. Many people go on skiing, fishing, hiking trips etc and may want to ship irregular or oversized items.
-You need to send something to a friend, family member, or loved one that lives far away.
-You are sending gifts to a travel destination for a holiday, birthday, etc.
-Study abroad or going to school overseas.
-An extended stay somewhere.