How do West Highland Way Baggage Carriers Work?
So you want to do the West Highland Way.
You’ve seen how beautiful it is and fancy grabbing yourself a slice of the gorgeous mountains and lochs, but you don’t fancy schlepping a mighty great rucksack around with you.
And you’ve seen that there are companies offering to carry your bags for you, but just how do they work?
It’s actually pretty simple.
Lucky for you (and for me, since I’m writing this), there’s not an awful lot to it. You just have to follow these simple steps:
- Decide where you’re going to be starting and ending each day, and how many days you’re going to take to do the walk. For more info on how difficult the hike is, to help with these decisions, read my guide here.
- Decide if you want your bags carried the whole way or part of the way
- Pick your company and input the details from steps 1 and 2.
That’s it.
You just need to let your chosen courier know where you’ll be each morning and they’ll collect your bag (usually around 9am, so you’ll need to be ready before then).
Later, as if by magic, the bag will reappear in your nighttime accomodation.
Booking
One of the best parts is that you don’t need to book well in advance. If you make it partway through the hike and feel like you fancy a break then you can get in touch with a courier the night before.
This is exactly what my girlfriend did, ahead of a pair of 19 mile days, and it worked an absolute treat.
Costs
The going rate is around £70 for 7 days, or £45 for 3 days if you’re doing a part hike.
Some of them will charge you on a day-by-day basis, for around £15.
Recommendation
I’m going to recommend the services of Baggage Freedom, for a number of reasons:
- They have a WhatsApp number, which makes communication really easy
- They collected from Inversnaid, which gave us much-needed flexibility
- They weren’t rude to us, nor did they charge us an admin fee of £10 for doing nothing, like other companies I could name…
Hopefully that’s a weight off your shoulders…
