We are visiting a college on our way to the airport from a work trip — so DD and I will each have a roller carryon size type bag.
We will be Uber if from our hotel to the college and then the airport.
Suggestions on what we can do with our roller bags during the tour? Is this a common problem with a simple solution? TIA!
I would have your child contact admissions in advance, explain the situation, and and ask if they can hold your luggage in the office during your visit. I imagine it will not be a problem.
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There is usually a check-in desk for the college tour, and they may be able to store your luggage there. If you have a direct contact for the place where you need to check-in, contact them. If not contact whoever oversees the college tours.
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It definitely helps to check ahead with the admissions office. But also be prepared to roll them with you on your tour. DD and I had to do this 6 years ago on a college tour at Caltech, as we Uber-ed to the campus from the airport, and then were going to Uber to our hotel from there. Unfortunately the office there was not able to accommodate storage for our carry-on size roller bags, I think they just didn’t want to accept responsibility in case something happened to them, or if they started providing storage for us, maybe they would have to do this for everyone. So we dragged them with us on the hour long tour. The campus in Pasadena is not so large, but the roller wheels were a bit noisy over some of the brick like pavement, which was mildly embarrassing and affected what we could hear the tour guide saying.
If the college you are touring cannot/will not accommodate luggage storage (some state policy explicitly on their “visit us” FAQs), consider using a luggage shipping service like Ship Sticks to ship your bags from your hotel to home the morning you check out.
would you consider renting a car for one day? you can then drive yourself and leave the luggage in the trunk.
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We did just that during our visit to UCSD.
We used Turo so we were able to meet the host at the parking lot to get the key, put our luggage into the trunck, did the tour, drove off for lunch, then meet the host in the lot of the hotel and hang over the key.
This way we didn’t have to drop off the car at the specific car rental place before or after.
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Brilliant idea. Most of the tours we reserved specifically stated in the email that they could not store luggage under any circumstances.
Depending upon the location of the hotel, college and airport, you could leave your bags at the hotel and stop back on the way to the airport. There are also some luggage storage services online, but I have never used them.
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Thanks for the suggestions! I hope others find them helpful! I loved the Turo story in the parking lot. We’ll be at an urban school so that wouldn’t work but I love it. As someone else mentioned there are some online services you can use to book luggage storage at partner hotels and such. There wasn’t a storage option close enough to our school but it would have been our plan B (along with an Uber). Someone suggested our hotel which of course makes sense if the hotel is close by — our whole point was that we didn’t want to have to backtrack a half hour to our hotel before continuing back toward airport. So just pointing out to others that of course this is an option if your hotel is close by. But it turns out the school will let us leave our luggage at the office. So all worked out!
Thanks for sharing your ideas and experiences. (Also I totally pictured us being like that cal tech tour!)
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Just want to point out that it all depends on the host when you rent a car through Turo. Some hosts might have a specific meeting location for pickup and drop off.
Luckily my host was ok with meeting us at the Whole Food Market parking lot, which was close to the school.
Also Turo is a peer-to-peer rental, some insurances might not cover it (Farmers don’t… *shake fist)
Could be security concerns, space constraints in the admissions office, or any number of reasons. In any event the OPs situation has been happily resolved five days ago.