About Send My Bag®

Why choose Send My Bag?

Send My Bag is a personal effects shipping company that allows you to travel comfortably with what you need, while also skipping baggage carousel waits and avoiding growing airline baggage fees.

What do we mean by personal effects?  Luggage and excess baggage, boxes and care packages, sports equipment & more. 

Where do we ship? We offer thousands of global route combinations. Travelling from the USA to Europe for study, our low cost by air service is unbeatable on price. Moving to Australia  for a Gap year from the UK, you'll join thousands like you using Send My Bag. Traveling to the Middle East for work, customers have saved thousands vs some of the long haul airlines' excess baggage fees. We also offer domestic services within a number of countries including the United States, Australia, UK and Italy.

Who uses Send My Bag? In the same way everyone on your next flight might have a slightly different reason for travelling, people choose Send My Bag for a host of reasons.  Students traveling use us domestically and abroad , we're the go to international relocation partner for many corporations and mobility services, vacation & holiday travel, household names in sports and entertainment travelling to movie locations and tournaments, customers with reduced mobility who enjoy not having to carry luggage, there is huge range of reasons for choosing Send My Bag. 

A factor which does connect a lot of our customers though is they are often going somewhere for more than a couple of weeks. If you're going somewhere for longer you will often have more than one piece of luggage, which is so much more hassle than travelling with one piece, especially when taking public transport. Many airlines also now charge substantial fees for additional items, so the reasons for choosing Send My Bag when study or moving abroad start to stack up quickly.  Once you have chosen to use Send My Bag it also means you can now travel with more, perhaps you were leaving some items behind you would have preferred to take with you, with Send My Bag you can travel with as many pieces of luggage or boxes as you need.

You can browse over 100,000, which you can also filter based on the countries you are travelling between and you'll get even more of an idea of the wide range of reasons people choose us when travelling all around the world.

From idea to millions of moves completed

Send My Bag has  been helping customers travel light for almost 20 years, but we went from idea to helping customers within only a matter of weeks in the summer of 2006. 

As he usually did at the end of the academic year in June, our founder Adam travelled from Northern Ireland to his girlfriend's university in England to help her clear out her dorm room and bring her belongings home again. They went through the usual process of dragging a couple of suitcases across town to the bus station and taking a coach to the airport. The difference this time though, when they checked-in the bags they were charged more than the price of the ticket in excess baggage fees. What was more interesting though he had seen several other passengers before him complaining when they had also been charged.

Adam had started selling online while at school and had given himself 3 years (his own time at university!) to get one of his business ideas to the stage that it paid him enough to live on. By this stage he had established a business that had gone from selling some sheet music books he bought from a bankrupt music store on eBay, to manufacturing is own line of education grade musical instruments which he sold on-line. In other words, Adam spent his days importing goods from factories and shipping to customers around the world, he knew the costs involved in moving something by air freight and it wasn't anything like what the airline charged that day.

On the flight home Adam kept thinking about their experience that day, they'd humped these heavy suitcases across town, paid a rip-off fee (after already paying for the luggage) and they probably still had a 30 min baggage carousel wait when they landed... He thought about how he could ship his musical instruments safely door to door around the UK, to the USA and all around Europe and the world, and as much of a cliche as it is, jotted down 'sendmybag.com' on a napkin!

The first thing Adam did that day when he got home was to search online for a service that shipped luggage to and from universities, after all if someone else was already offering a cost effective solution they could just use that next time. He couldn't find one and so SendMyBag.com was born.

The first Send My Bag website was setup within a week or so for under £100, he didn't need or want a fancy book system when he didn't know if it would catch on or not, so he focused on making it look OK and be simply to use, he would then manually arrange the shipping using the same services he trusted with his musical instrument shipments. With the website up and running it was time to promote the idea, well used to making things happen on a budget rather than spending on marketing, he wanted to find a way of getting the service mention on local TV. The music business had recently made a few customs items for Brian Travers from the band UB40, Adam connected a local news presenter and asked if they would be in interested in running an "and finally" story at the end of the news about this young fella who had made these items for UB40 and who was now starting this new business that could be really helpful for local students who study in GB. The local news presenter liked the idea, ran the story on a Friday night and Send My Bag helped several dozen students from Northern Ireland ship their luggage to university in at the start of the next term!

And thus Send My Bag was born, making travel once again the enjoyable experience that it used to be, by sending luggage, personal effects, parcels and sports equipment for its customers.

We now specialise in international shipping with efficient customs clearance and operate 24/7.

An innovator in their sector, Send My Bag have gone on from small beginnings, of just trying to help students get their bags home more quickly and easily without having excess luggage fees slapped on by airlines, to becoming the industry leader in the sector worldwide.

Today Send My Bag operates thousands of routes, has developed specialist and unrivalled cross-border customs clearance procedures and is open for our customers 24hrs / day. In April 2018 and again in 2022 Send My Bag was awarded The Queen's Award for Enterprise, the highest official business award in the UK in recognition of our growth in international markets. Oh, and Which? and Money Saving Expert have both independently researched and shown how Send My Bag can save you money.

Innovation every day

At Send My Bag innovation and expertise go hand in hand, from pre-emptive tracking alerts to providing estimated transit times based on your postcode rather than country; every day we want to get better. Over the last 10 years in particular our operations team have worked with officials in over 100 countries developing new ways to allow almost instantaneous customs clearance of personal effects across international borders. 2024 saw the launch of our own vehicle premium collections across Ireland, in early 2025 premium collections arrived in London and they will be coming to several more global cities across the next 2 years.  

Our customers are our number one source of inspiration. Over 100,000 people have now taken the time to review the service and it's often from amongst those comments that we draw our ideas for constantly improving the service. Once you've used Send My Bag, please do keep the suggestions coming!