The luxury-luggage market has exploded since the pandemic, with people returning to tourism en masse and wanting to travel in style. There are bags with colored polycarbonate shells, expandable aluminum frames, and built-in slots for IDs and AirTags. There are garment bags that fold up into duffels, suitcases with pop-out cup and phone holders, and bags that charge your phone. Consumers have a wealth of fashionable and convenient options.

And it’s paying off. Samsonite’s stock price has grown steadily since 2020, and status suitcase brand Rimowa, which is owned by LVMH, saw double-digit percentages of revenue growth in 2022 over prepandemic performance. The luggage market is expected to grow over 8% in the next decade.

But no matter how shiny and chrome a suitcase, a traveler still has to deal with the physical fact of their luggage. When you’re overburdened with bags and tired out from long days of traveling, there’s simply no modern convenience that can make your luggage carry itself.

The system for toting your possessions through airports is a nightmare — yet carry-on luggage is so popular that it’s become a crisis on airlines, an annoyance to many travelers thanks to the de-bundling of air-travel services. “Travelers ought to dream of a future without carry-on luggage,” Ian Bogost recently argued in The Atlantic. Even as more and more passengers carry on rather than check their luggage to save money, globally airlines still managed to rake in over $33 billion in baggage fees in 2023, up 15% from the year before. It seems the industry has a vested interest in keeping travelers’ bags within their unbundled ecosystem. 

A tired traveler might find themselves idly wishing they were an elite tourist of yesteryear, when the idea of carrying one’s own baggage was foreign because, as the saying went, they “sent their bags ahead.” Luggage forwarding seems like a sector primed for disruption — something that’s too good to be true. In an age when we can get almost anything delivered in two hours, why not? But in America, at least, the companies that offer such services haven’t reached market saturation. 

“I don’t see it as any more than a premium service, because it’s not going to be less money than the airlines,” Mark Cuban said when Brian Altomare, the founder of luggage-forwarding system LugLess, appeared on “Shark Tank” in 2013. Altomare unsuccessfully pitched a door-to-door proprietary luggage-courier service, asking for a $100,000 investment in return for a 10% stake in the company.

LugLess is still in business, focused on keeping luggage forwarding cheap, fast, and easy. Its services start at $15 per bag and are limited to the US. Unlike Altomare’s original pitch, it uses existing courier networks like UPS and FedEx to ship bags, leaving your stuff at their mercy. Instead, LugLess keeps prices down by using a proprietary search engine that finds the cheapest label among the services. 

If only the travel economy rewarded such an idea: that we could travel unburdened by the things we carry. How did we get to a place where our luggage has become an extension of us? To look forward, we must first look back. 

“Why be a human truck horse?”

It’s only recently that travel in general became something everyone had access to rather than a premium luxury experience. 

According to historian Sarah Pickman, travel began to take on a different meaning in the mid-1800s. Before then, she said, “it used to be that travel was kind of either something that people did because they were really desperate — migrants or religious pilgrims — or if they were extremely wealthy, like people going on the Grand Tour.” 

By the 1850s, widespread use of the steam engine made ship and train travel accessible for the non-elite as well as increasingly popular among the wealthy. No matter the class you traveled in, your luggage would be subject to the same dangers: weather, accidents, user error. Waterproof trunks were heavily advertised to migrants and luxury travelers alike, because water entering the cargo hold of a ship doesn’t care how much your ticket cost. 

In the 1900s, with domestic and international travel opening up for millions thanks to cars and planes, heavy pieces of luggage made of linen, leather, or wicker over steel or wood frames were exchanged for vessels made of modern materials: nylon, aluminum, and polyester. 

“If you look at the early 20th century, it's almost all trunks,” Pickman said, “and then by the ’30s and ’40s, it's almost all suitcases.” In the 1930s, the word “trunk” came to refer not to the large piece of luggage strapped onto the back bumper of a car, but to the built-in luggage compartment in the back of the vehicle itself. 

Suitcases, with their slimmer profiles and convenient handles, became the dominant form of luggage, but were still cumbersome and had to be carried by hand or carted by porters. Well into the 20th century, railways and steamship companies employed their own porters, responsible for unloading heavy trunks, cases, and bags from vehicles arriving at the station and loading them again onto baggage cars on behalf of paying passengers. 

Without porters, rail travel could not have functioned. In America, “porter” became synonymous with the Pullman porter. After the Civil War, industrialist George Pullman hired freed slaves to handle luggage and attend to first-class passengers’ needs on his newly designed sleeping cars on trains. The Pullman Co. employed its own porters until it folded in 1968. At that point, with the rise of air travel, door-to-door luggage transport became the responsibility of travelers themselves for all but the superrich. Ease and convenience when transporting luggage became a priority for travelers.

Enter the rolling suitcase. The innovation surfaced a few times independently before it caught on. Women in particular had fashioned makeshift rolling luggage, including a wheeled cart known as a “portable porter” which cases could be strapped to. Anita Willets-Burnham, a Chicago artist, was perhaps the first innovator in the wheeled-suitcase category. While touring the world in the 1920s with her family of six, she carried her possessions in a bespoke rolling case made from a baby carriage and featuring a telescoping handle. “Why be a human truck horse?” she said before a trip in 1928. Willets-Burnham was far ahead of her time: the telescoping handle would not be patented for nearly 60 years.

Inventor Bernard Sadow received the first patent for a rolling suitcase in 1972. His creation was a hard-shell case with four caster wheels and a strap attached to the top so the traveler could tug it behind them. It struggled to catch on because of its perceived unmasculinity, according to Sadow. He initially had trouble selling it to department stores, which insisted that men could carry their own bags. Eventually he got Macy’s on board to stock the suitcases, and his invention took off. 

Sadow’s innovation was soon followed by that of Robert Plath, an airline pilot who in the late ’80s turned his suitcase vertically and added wheels and a telescoping handle. He called his innovation the “Rollaboard” and marketed it to pilots and flight attendants. It became so popular that Plath retired from piloting to dedicate his time to his new company, TravelPro.

Today, it’s a rare traveler who doesn’t own at least one Rollaboard-style bag. The modern luggage market has boomed as an industry, estimated to be worth $187 billion globally in 2024, with over $29 billion of that from the US. The industry quickly bounced back from the pandemic, and the market share occupied by luxury bags has grown from 20 to 32% in the past decade. 

The far-off dream of forwarding

Outside the US, porters and luggage-forwarding services are more common. 

In India, licensed railway porters — most often seen in their iconic red shirts — are still on hand to take travelers’ luggage as they were a century ago, though the rise of rolling bags, luxury trains, and station offerings on par with airports has contributed to a decline in demand for their services and a major threat to their livelihood. 

In Switzerland, there are services like AlpTransfer, which offers to transport your baggage to and from various destinations, including airports, allowing travelers to enjoy the scenic trains or hike along the mountains unburdened by luggage.

In Japan, luggage forwarding is not just common but affordable and easy. Yamato, founded in 1919, has counters in Japanese railway stations and airports around the country, and its services are also offered in most hotels. Yamato has a proprietary network of couriers, kiosks, and vehicles which ensure swift and standardized delivery. Its “TA-Q-BIN” service, which allows a small suitcase to be picked up and delivered for 4,420 yen ($30), is the most popular and well known of the many luggage-forwarding services on offer throughout the country. 

Other luggage-forwarding services exist globally, including Luggage to Ship and Send My Bag, but most people are still rolling their belongings by hand. There’s nothing like the journey from Terminal 5 at JFK to the Airtrain to either the new Uber pickup zone or the subway to make you wish for a Yamato courier depositing your bag in your building lobby the morning after you return. 

LugLess, operating in 50 states, has seen growth in interesting combinations of cities over the past few years, said co-CEO Audrey Kohout, like Frisco, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, and San Diego. She’s looking forward to expanding their services, saying the company is “always open to new industries, including airlines, travel, and luggage brands.” But they have no plans to expand beyond the US, and are not partnered directly with any airlines or hotel chains.

Paying for convenience, and not necessarily luxury, should be a more accessible option for domestic travel. Perhaps a disruptive improvement in luggage forwarding, on the level of Bernard Sadow’s wheeled stroke of genius, is what we need. For now, we must live with our smart bags.

Allegra Rosenberg is a journalist in New York.