Luggage delivery service SendMyBag.com is expanding operations into the United States and also is developing services specific to corporate accounts.
Based in Northern Ireland, SendMyBag began offering door-to-door luggage delivery, in lieu of checked bags on airlines, in the United Kingdom a few years ago and since has spread into the rest of Europe and, as of November, onto transatlantic routes in the United States. With a new office in New York, SendMyBag in March plans to begin offering services for domestic routes in the United States, said CEO and founder Adam Ewart.
With a pricing model based on "a similar amount or slightly less" of what low-cost carriers would charge to check luggage, SendMyBag has done a significant amount of corporate business, particularly with relocations in which travelers checking multiple bags could face fees from the airlines equivalent to several hundred dollars, Ewart said.
"We're finding a lot of corporate travel agents have started using it, booking on behalf of their clients, though not so much within corporations as yet," he said. "A lot is about the convenience factor—you don’t have to queue for bag drop or the baggage carousel—and we've made the price factor viable as well."
Once SendMyBag rolls out domestic delivery service in the United States, it's also planning to develop a corporate account service, Ewart said. The service will not be so much for special corporate pricing—though the company would be willing to look at that "on a case-by-case basis," he said—but for better management, enabling either corporate travel agencies or travel managers to log in with an account and manage deliveries for multiple trips.
"We're more about the service front, because shipping personal effects is different from shipping commercial items," Ewart said. “We have relationships with custom authorities to eliminate the documents and get pre-clearance, so if you send me a suitcase from Belfast to New York, it's collected at 4 p.m. and delivered at noon the next day."
Additionally, the company plans to expand to more service routes, including new routes in the Asia/Pacific region, he said.