A traveller's suitcase belongs in the parcel network, not on the bus

In the autumn of 2014 I stood on the platform of a two-car train in southern Kyushu and counted suitcases. I was then marketing Mikasane Railway's hot-spring line to visitors from Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and we had been more successful than the timetable could absorb. On the morning I counted, eleven large cases filled the vestibules and much of the aisle. Two schoolchildren and an older man with a stick stood for forty minutes. Nobody had done anything wrong. The visitors had brought what visitors bring, and the train had no room for it.

That morning shaped how I think about inbound tourism. Japan's busiest destinations now treat the large suitcase as a crowding problem on city buses, local trains and narrow streets, and the usual responses are signs, announcements and occasional restrictions. I think the problem is better treated as a logistics problem. A suitcase does not need to travel with its owner on the day of arrival. In almost every case it would be happier in a van, and so would the residents who share the bus.

A suitcase takes a seat

The arithmetic is simple and rarely stated. A full-size suitcase occupies roughly the floor space of a standing passenger, and on a crowded service it often takes a seat as well. On a city bus route used by both residents and visitors, a dozen suitcases can remove a fifth of the vehicle's practical capacity at the busiest hour. Transport operators cannot add buses quickly, because they face the same shortage of drivers that parcel carriers do. Every case moved off the bus is capacity returned to people who need it daily.

Japan already has the network to do this. Luggage forwarding has existed for decades; domestic travellers send golf bags and ski cases ahead without a second thought, and Japan's tourism authorities have promoted hands-free travel counters for years. What has been missing is a decision to make forwarding the normal choice for visitors rather than a premium extra discovered by the well informed. When we opened the first luggage counter at Mikasane's terminal station in 2015, it handled 64,000 bags in its first year, almost entirely from visitors who saw it by accident on the way to the platform.

At Kazemachi Travel Baggage we now forward 1.46 million bags a year from counters at four airports and eleven major stations, up from 380,000 three years ago. Growth came from three changes: moving counters to the point where visitors first stop after landing, selling the service in four languages with one printed card rather than a brochure, and letting hotels add forwarding to the booking itself. The last change mattered most. A visitor who sees the option when she books her room arrives expecting to hand her case over.

Sell the morning, not the bag

The mistake carriers make, and I have made it, is to market luggage forwarding as a product about the bag. The customer does not care about the bag. She cares about her first morning: arriving at the airport, dropping two heavy cases and taking the train into the city with a small backpack, free to walk around a temple or a market before check-in. Our most successful counter material shows no luggage at all. It shows the station exit and the time she will reach it.

Selling the morning also means being honest about what the network can carry. Visitor arrivals come in waves, with sharp peaks in cherry-blossom and autumn-leaf seasons and around the new year holidays of neighbouring countries. Since April 2024, with drivers' overtime capped, we cannot meet those peaks by asking crews to work longer. Same-day forwarding from an airport depends on a van leaving by a fixed time and reaching city hotels before evening. When that van is full, the promise has to be withdrawn at the counter, clearly and early, and replaced with next-day delivery at a lower price.

We price standard cases from ¥2,400 for next-day delivery and ¥3,600 for same-day. The difference reflects real cost, since same-day bags travel in dedicated vans while next-day bags join our ordinary overnight flows. I would rather sell twice as many next-day bags than overpromise on same-day, and our counters now steer visitors towards next-day forwarding whenever their itinerary allows a night without the case.

Who should pay for the empty aisle

The hardest question is who pays. At present the visitor pays the whole price, which is reasonable, since she gets the convenience. But she is not the only beneficiary. The bus operator gains capacity it could not otherwise buy. Residents regain their seats. The city reduces a source of friction between visitors and the people who live there, which has become a political issue in several destinations. None of those beneficiaries currently contributes to the cost of the counters that make forwarding easy.

Several Japanese cities already levy accommodation taxes on visitors. I think a small share of that revenue could reasonably fund luggage counters at the stations and bus terminals where crowding is worst, through open tender among carriers, with the counter's location and opening hours set by the city rather than the operator. A city that funds counters can reasonably ask the carrier for data on bags moved and peak capacity, and can measure whether the buses actually became less crowded.

There are objections, and some are fair. A visitor who forwards her case is parted from her belongings for a night, which some will not accept. Forwarding works badly for itineraries that change daily. And a carrier that wins a city's counter tender gains an advantage its competitors may resent. These are reasons to design the arrangement carefully, not to keep treating suitcases as a nuisance to be managed with signs.

The two schoolchildren I saw standing in 2014 are adults now. The trains on that line still carry visitors, and since 2016 a growing share of their luggage has gone by van. Nobody advertised the change. The aisles simply emptied, which is the best result a marketing programme of this kind can hope for.