Sometimes you find yourself in a city where you need to spend a few hours until leaving. You have a suitcase with you. But you really don’t want to lug your baggage around town while you visit some of the sites, and let time pass until it is time to leave. You search the railway station for a locker where you can leave your bags, but there are none. What to do? Walk around town with your bag? No, there’s a solution to this. Get the right app and you’ll be able to leave your bag for a few hours (or days). Here’s how.
We had been to this very nice countryside chateau-hotel for the night. In the morning, after breakfast, we were driven into the town centre where we had a train to catch in the afternoon. We had enough time to see all the important sites in the city – the cathedral, the main square, the old town… – and also to have a nice lunch before our train was leaving.
But we had our bags. Sightseeing with suitcases is not so fun.
We went over to the train station, a fairly big station, and looked for the place where they had storage lockers. We could not find any. So we found a friendly SNCF staff member and asked where they were. “We don’t have any lockers,” he said. “Oh, no,” we thought, “a day dragging our bags around town.” But we were wrong. The friendly SNCF person then said, “But look at this app and you will find a place to leave your bags.” What app? Well, it turns out this, too, has become a ubiquitous internet service – connecting bag-carrying travellers with places that have some space to spare.
The app was called Nannybag.
Not without some initial difficulty, we managed to create an account on the app and then find a place to store our bags for the hours we had in Rennes (as it were). It was an 8-minute walk from the station, but that was certainly much better than 4 hours with the bags. We booked our three bags on the app and then walked to the address that was given.
It turned out the place where we were supposed to drop off our bags was an optician’s. Yes, he was expecting us. Yes, he would keep our bags until the afternoon. Yes, they were there when we came back to pick them up. It cost us about the same as a train station locker would have, maybe a few euros more. But our problem was solved.
More recently, I was in Milan to pick up a group to head to Piedmont to taste barolos and barbarescos. I arrived just before noon and had the pickup at four in the afternoon. Same problem. Same solution. This time, Nannybag directed me to an underground parking where I could store my big roller bag, just a two-minute walk from our rendezvous spot. Again, perfect; problem solved.
It turns out that there are many apps like this that let you find a place to store your luggage for a few hours or even a few days. I have only tried Nannybag and was quite happy with that:
- Nannybag, the one I’ve used
- Bounce
- Stasher
- LuggageHero
- and others
You may want to review the terms and conditions (for example, the insurance coverage they offer) and make sure you don’t leave any vital items in the bag, like your passport. Nannybag also had a bit of a challenge in Sweden (I just made a test): they had missed adjusting the currency. A 150 euro daily bag charge seemed a bit excessive, but a 150 SEK daily bag charge was not. They quickly corrected the issue when I contacted them, which also showed that they had very responsive customer service.
