Luggage collection service Bagpoint partially bankrupt, focus on Middle East

Bagpoint was founded in 2017 under the name Leave Your Luggage by entrepreneur Rutger van Beek. While working for Booking.com, he noticed that travelers needed a service that would deliver their suitcases to Schiphol Airport. This meant they didn't have to lug them around, leaving them free to enjoy themselves between checking out of their hotel or Airbnb and their flight.

Van Beek raised seed capital , including from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO.nl) and several small investors. A year after its founding, the company changed its name to Bagpoint, and began checking in suitcases at the airport.

Since its founding, Bagpoint has faced some headwinds. Initially, the young company faced competition from large players like PostNL and other startups like Luggo and Bagbooking. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 also severely hampered growth.

Last fall, Van Beek also complained about Schiphol's lack of cooperation and lack of willingness to innovate. According to the entrepreneur, his company could make a significant contribution to reducing the airport's long check-in lines, but "Schiphol didn't follow through." As a result, Bagpoint couldn't handle large volumes of suitcases. "Suppliers are being paralyzed or even going bankrupt," Van Beek warned at the time in the Telegraaf newspaper .

Nevertheless, the outlook for Bagpoint remained favorable, as the entrepreneur has regularly emphasized in the media in recent years. In the spring of 2023, the company partnered with travel agency TUI, later winning a promising tender in Saudi Arabia and closing a deal with Singapore Airlines.

These steps would help Bagpoint realize its ambition: to become an international door-to-door baggage handler, collecting suitcases from travelers' homes and delivering them back to their final destination.

Now it appears that one of Bagpoint's subsidiaries—originally named Leave Your Luggage BV —is bankrupt. The most recent annual accounts filed with the Chamber of Commerce show that the small company had already run out of financial reserves by the end of 2023, with negative equity of €1.8 million and almost €2 million in debt.

Founder Van Beek emphasized to RTL Z that the subsidiary's bankruptcy will not harm the parent company's operations. "The operation is still running as usual, and so are the contracts with the airlines and other partners."

According to him, it's merely an organizational change, though he can't elaborate. "I left Bagpoint as director at the beginning of this year. The reason was that certain choices were made in the market, including by Schiphol, which made our objectives unattainable here. That's why we decided to focus on the Middle East."

Earlier this year, Van Beek was succeeded by Mohammed Aburiyaleh, who, according to his LinkedIn page, had been Bagpoint's director in the Middle East since 2019. "Since then, I've only been involved with the company as a silent partner, so I can't say much more about its developments," said Van Beek.

The entrepreneur says he doesn't know what consequences the subsidiary's bankruptcy will have for the company's employees and creditors. Aburiyaleh did not yet respond to a request for comment. Trustee Anouk Nolte, who is handling the bankruptcy, was unavailable for comment today.

Airline carry-on baggage regulations have become much stricter in recent years. Watch the video below for tips on how to get your suitcase into the cabin: