Luggage storage is a pretty common function at hotels. Any of us regular business travelers are familiar with that annoying gray area between check-out time on the last day of a trip and the time your work responsibilities actually end and you can catch an Uber back to the airport, luggage in tow.
Most often the solution to that problem is just to drop your bags with some helpful hotel employee, who will safely stow your bags until you’re ready to go, at no cost other than a tip (please, tip!).
It’s a simple problem with a simple solution. But a recent trip I took to Washington, D.C., reinforced the fact that this remarkably simple solution doesn’t seem to exist nearly as prevalently in the wild.
I’ll lay out the circumstances for you: I was flying from Cleveland to D.C. for a one-night stay to cover a conference. Because of cost and limited flight selections, I ended up flying into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport early in the morning even though my final destination was Leesburg, Virginia—much closer to Dulles International Airport—and I didn’t need to be there until the evening.
So there I was with all day to kill in the heart of D.C., which should have provided me the opportunity to go on a mini-adventure around the city, taking in the sights and visiting all the great stuff D.C. has to offer, except I was lugging around a massive rolling suitcase full of camera equipment. That’s something I don’t think the folks at the Smithsonian would be cool with me pushing around through the exhibits.
A quick Google search for a place to store it at a reasonable price yielded me no useful results, so what could have been a fun day of adventure turned into me sitting on a park bench at Potomac Park, which was wonderful and thankfully right in the heart of cherry blossom season, but still not what I’d have been doing if I was unencumbered.
After all this happened, someone helpfully reminded me that any number of hotels could’ve provided the service I was looking for, and during my initial search I found a bunch on online comments basically suggesting that you just pretend to be a hotel guest to get your bags stowed away. But the fact that this isn’t a widely known service for non-guests, and furthermore that it isn’t something that has been truly monetized, seems strange to me.
I get that there is some amount of risk involved in storing bags like that, but the security risk of any baggage isn’t made any more or less real if the person is a guest or not. It seems like it would be remarkably simple to let people know they can walk into your hotel, present an official ID and for a flat or hourly fee put their bags away somewhere they don’t have to worry about them.
That seems like a service that is pretty close to pure profit and is limited only by the space you have available for short-term storage.
So my question to hoteliers out there is: Is this something you’re willing to do, and if so, are you doing anything to get that message out to the world? If the answer to either of those questions is “no,” maybe you should reconsider.
What do you think? Let me know via email or on Twitter.
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