Making travelling with luggage a whole lot easier

While waiting for luggage to come out on a forlorn carousel at the airport, we’ve all thought: there’s got to be another way. Send My Bag is making getting your luggage to your destination a lot easier, writes Martin Friel

Adam Ewart used Dragons’ Den to gain PR for his business (Send My Bag)

Anyone who has travelled on a budget airline will be familiar with the frustration and even anger that often characterises the journey. Whether it be the attempts to squeeze as much money as possible out of passengers or the delays and inefficiency that seem to be part and parcel of the experience, many of us have sworn to never fly with them again, only to do just that a few months later. Either we have short memories or we just don’t care enough to act.

But one individual who was annoyed enough to act is Adam Ewart, founder of Send My Bag, a luggage transport business. The concept is pretty straightforward. Travellers book to have their luggage picked up from their home and delivered to their destination ahead of their arrival, using existing courier companies and routes to facilitate. Crucially, it is priced to be cheaper than airlines charge to place luggage in the hold.

The idea came to Ewart in 2010 when he was helping his girlfriend travel back home from university. The couple were charged for 3kg of excess baggage, something that didn’t sit well with Ewart. So when he got home after the flight, he checked to see if there was an alternative service and, finding that there wasn’t, set up Send My Bag that same week.

Although initially targeted at the student market, the move by airlines towards introducing more and more ancillary fees – for checking in baggage, checking in at the airport or selecting a seat – saw the appeal of Send My Bag extend into other demographics.

And Ewart believes the appeal will only broaden further as airlines become increasingly reliant on ancillary income to protect their wafer-thin margins.

“Every airline has moved into this ancillary revenue-generating model,” says Ewart.

“They’ve got into a race to the bottom and their businesses are really quite fragile. They raced to the bottom and then tried to bolster seat prices through ancillary schemes.”

According to research, in 2019 airlines were on track to generate nearly $110bn worldwide from ancillary income, representing more than 12 per cent of overall revenue for the sector.

As the airlines emerge from a pretty brutal lockdown experience, Ewart believes the appetite for ancillary income is only going to increase, driving more and more customers into the arms of Send My Bag.

“I don’t think they can back out of those models. They are businesses based on ancillary revenue now and they have dug themselves into a massive hole,” he says.

Ewart believes this is good news for him and his business. But how, when everyone else just grumbles about the penny-pinching and moves on, did Ewart spot the opportunity to profit from airline greed?

The answer lies in one of his earliest forays into the world of business.

To say the Dragons were unimpressed is putting it mildly, with Peter Jones describing it as ‘the most ridiculous, ludicrous, stupid, insane valuation’

“I’m 35 now and I have never had a full-time job. I had a part time one when I was 16, but that’s it,” he explains.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve just tried to do whatever I could to buy and sell.”

From selling on unwanted mobile phones as a teenager, he moved on to buying and selling records and then selling music lesson books.

“I was talking to a guy in London who had bought the contents of a music shop in London that had gone bust. I bought the books for £500 and sold them online for about £10,000,” he says.

He could see the opportunity and made a move to start buying and selling the musical instruments themselves.

“I tried to get into that and although I could buy some, one of the main distributors I needed would only sell me the instruments at a higher price for what the competition was selling for. It’s an old boy’s network.

“I found their factory in China and there was a rule that you couldn’t have a closed factory, which means they were obliged to make products for other people. So I started selling instruments.”

So when the airline added its excess baggage fee on that fateful day, Ewart knew it didn’t cost that much to transport goods and baggage. He knew that he could do it much cheaper.

It is this determination to do what he wants, a canniness in the way he operates, that seems to define Ewart’s approach to business. Take his appearance on Dragons’ Den in 2012, for example.

He asked for £100,000 in exchange for 5 per cent of his business. To say the Dragons were unimpressed is putting it mildly, with Peter Jones describing it as “the most ridiculous, ludicrous, stupid, insane valuation”.

Needless to say, Ewart didn’t get his investment but the next day he issued a press release to announce he had secured the £100,000 from a different investor. What he didn’t say was that the investment had been secured some time before his appearance on the show. He had, it would appear, used the show purely for PR.

“Once we had that investment agreed, we knew we were going to push the business ahead. We needed to start the PR campaign,” he explains.

“The best way to get that launchpad was to go on Dragons’ Den. It was reasonably fair but I knew they weren’t going to accept the offer,” he says.

While the Dragons’ savaging didn’t seem to dent his confidence in his vision, it may have left him with a jaundiced view of the world of the entrepreneur.

“I can’t be bothered with all that or the business books or self-help,” he says.

“I don’t hang out with business people. I’ve been asked to do every kind of business event, but I don’t do anything. I went to one last year but just thought, nah.”

Despite that, he does seem to have a genuine love for business. It’s not the theory of business that excites him, though, it’s the act of trading that has kept him going since his teenage years.

“I just really like everything to do with being in business. It’s my hobby, it excites me,” he says.

While he is not looking for an exit from Send My Bag just yet – “it has so much potential for growth in the years to come” – he is looking for new opportunities to invest in and mentor start-ups.

But until then, he remains focused on building the business that grew out of a grumble.