One of the most annoying parts of travel isn’t the flight or the train ride; it’s the dead time in between.
You’ve checked out, your next departure is hours away, and you’d like to explore a bit more, but your suitcase has other ideas.
Luggage storage apps solve exactly that problem. For a small fee, you can drop your bags somewhere safe, enjoy a few extra hours of sightseeing, and pick them up on your way out of town.
In this guide, we’ll look at how these services work, which apps are worth knowing, and when it actually makes sense to pay to store your bags.
How Luggage Storage Apps Work
Most luggage storage services follow the same basic model, which makes them easy to use once you’ve tried one.
You start by searching for the city or neighbourhood where you want to store your bags. The app or website shows you a map of partner locations, which can be hotels, cafés, shops, offices, or dedicated storage facilities.
The model is also a neat win–win. On one side, travellers get an easy, bookable way to store bags exactly where they want to spend time.
On the other, brick-and-mortar businesses – anything from retail shops to cafés and small offices – earn a bit of extra side income for using space they already have, plus a steady stream of potential customers walking through the door.
You choose a spot that fits your plans, usually based on proximity to a train station, an airport bus stop, or the area you plan to explore.
Once you’ve chosen a location, you book and pay online for the number of bags and the date you need.
When you arrive, you show your confirmation, the staff check your booking, and your bags are tagged, scanned, or logged.
At the end of the day, you come back during opening hours, show your confirmation again, and collect your luggage.
What you’re really buying is a combination of convenience and location. Instead of being anchored to your accommodation or forced to carry everything with you, you can design your day around where you want to spend time, not where your suitcase is.
Quick Comparison: Popular Luggage Storage Apps
There are plenty of luggage storage services out there, but a few names come up repeatedly and cover most major cities.
Bounce is often the easiest starting point, especially in large urban centres. It has a wide network of partner locations, and in many cities you’ll see several options clustered around train stations, transport hubs, and popular neighbourhoods.
The app is straightforward to use, and Bounce typically includes relatively generous coverage limits in case of loss or damage. It isn’t always the absolute cheapest, but it tends to offer the most choice and the least friction.
Radical Storage focuses on simplicity. In many destinations, it charges a flat daily rate per bag, which makes it ideal if you know you’ll be out for most of the day and don’t want to think about hourly pricing. It has a strong presence across Europe and many other popular cities worldwide.
On my Bonn stop, booking a spot near the station took only a couple of minutes, and the flat rate made it easy to decide that it was worth it.
LuggageHero takes a slightly different approach by combining hourly pricing with a daily cap. That structure makes it attractive if you only need storage for a few hours before a train or flight, but want the peace of mind of a maximum daily charge.
It doesn’t cover as many cities as the other two, but where it does operate, it’s a good way to avoid paying for a full day when you only need a short window.
All three services aim to do the same thing – hold onto your bags while you enjoy the city – but they each have a slightly different angle in terms of coverage, pricing, and flexibility.
Why Luggage Storage Apps Are So Useful
Luggage storage really shines on those awkward days when your plans and your bags are out of sync.
On one trip through Germany, I was travelling from Frankfurt to Cologne by train, but I wanted to make a quick stop in Bonn. The plan was to visit Beethoven-Haus Bonn, browse the HARIBO Shop Bonn, and walk through the cherry blossoms in the Old Town.
Bonn is compact enough that you can tick off all three in just a few hours, so it felt like the perfect place for a quick transit rather than somewhere I needed to spend the night.
Beethoven-Haus is the preserved birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven, now a compact museum that showcases his early life and manuscripts in the city where he grew up.
A short walk away, the Haribo shop taps into a different kind of local icon. Haribo – whose name comes from “HAns RIegel BOnn” – started in Bonn and went on to invent the original gummy bear.
The Bonn store leans into that heritage with hundreds of products from Haribo and Maoam, a large candy bar where you can mix your own bag, and a wide range of branded merch and international flavours.
I happened to be there during cherry blossom season, when streets like Heerstraße and the surrounding Altstadt turn into a pink tunnel of flowers and draw photographers from all over.
Whole blocks are lined with blossom trees, and it’s one of those places that looks like a filter in real life.
The only catch was my luggage. I had a big carry-on with me, and the last thing I wanted was to roll it through museum rooms, a crowded candy shop, and narrow streets full of people taking photos.
I found a Radical Storage location near the station, dropped the bag off in a few minutes, and then actually enjoyed Bonn: a slow wander through Beethoven’s childhood house, a candy run at the Haribo shop, a walk under the cherry blossoms, and then back to the station to continue on to Cologne. Without luggage storage, I probably would’ve skipped the stop entirely.
In Bangkok, I ran into a different version of the same problem. My flight was late at night, I’d already checked out of the hotel, and I wanted to do some last-minute shopping at a mall that was closer to the airport than to where I was staying.
The hotel could have stored my luggage, but that would have meant a pointless detour back across town just to pick it up. Instead, I found a Bounce location near the mall – which turned out to be a cat café – left my bags there, and headed off with just a small backpack before going straight to the airport.
In both cases, a relatively small fee turned awkward, half-useful days into proper bonus time in the city.
When a Luggage Storage App Makes the Most Sense
You won’t need a luggage storage app on every trip, but there are a few situations where they consistently pull their weight.
The first is on travel days where you’re in motion but still want to see something along the way. That might be a long layover, a gap of several hours between trains or buses, or a city-hopping itinerary where you’re stopping somewhere for just part of the day.
The Frankfurt–Bonn–Cologne routing is a good example: by storing your bags in Bonn, you can spend a few hours exploring the city instead of sitting in a station café.
The same logic applies if you’re zigzagging through Europe, Japan, or Southeast Asia and want to “sample” smaller cities without committing to an overnight stay. Dropping your luggage for the day makes those quick detours realistic and enjoyable instead of tiring.
The second is the classic late departure problem. If your flight leaves at night and you’ve already checked out, you’re either stuck carrying your bags or relying on whatever your accommodation can offer.
Hotels often store luggage, but Airbnbs and smaller guesthouses may not have that option, and even when storage is available, it isn’t always in a convenient part of town for how you want to spend your last day.
In Bangkok, using a Bounce location near the mall – rather than going back to the hotel – let me spend my final few hours exactly where I wanted to be and then head straight to the airport.
Whenever a small storage fee buys you several extra hours of low-stress, hands-free time in a place you’re already passing through, a luggage storage app is usually worth it.
Conclusion
Luggage storage apps aren’t the flashiest tools in a traveller’s toolkit, but they can quietly unlock a lot of value from the time you’ve already paid to be somewhere.
Platforms like Bounce, Radical Storage, and LuggageHero let you stop thinking about your suitcase and start thinking about how to use those awkward in-between hours – whether that’s a few museums in Bonn, some last-minute shopping in Bangkok, or a quick taste of a city you’re just passing through.
If your itinerary includes tight connections, late flights, or deliberate stopovers, it’s worth having at least one of these apps on your phone. You may not need it on every trip, but when you do, it can be the difference between simply passing through a place and actually getting to experience it.
This story originally appeared on princeoftravel
