How would you tag left luggage/luggage storage?

Question came to my mind after spotting such opening_hours sign (translated by Yandex):

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It is shop/office inside a train station (here).

My question is how should it be tagged?

I found only amenity=left_luggage (taginfo) but with below 50 uses worldwide. Do you know any better/more popular tagging scheme?

It is run by person, so amenity=luggage_locker(taginfo) would not fit.

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I certainly cannot think of anything else that may be used, and in the 21st century they are no longer common. The only one I can think of, at my London railway station, is mapped like that.

At one time coin operated self service left luggage lockers were common at large railway stations but the threat of terrorism has meant these have now been removed. Now they are an office where staff use airport style baggage scanning before luggage is accepted. For this to be cost effective there needs to be a much larger demand so it probably isn’t that common a feature.

Looking at those returned for the UK the only ones that maybe expected are Edinburgh and Birmingham.

When I looked at UK and Ireland data, I only found those two.

Edit See here. There are a couple of others too.

They are still everywhere in Japan. Both lockers, and shops or services (some are offered by groups of hotels and other businesses). However, the latter might not be added as a separate object.

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Apologies for advertising, but https://usebounce.com/ make a serious business out of this and are quite widespread. Very useful when your plane or train arrives or departs early or late.

The catch is, Bounce makes contracts with existing businesses – typically amenity=restaurant, shop=gift, or tourism=guest_house, i.e. luggage storage is just an ancillary service. That makes it somewhat inconvenient to combine with amenity=left_luggage. On the other hand, they will have the same business hours.

I believe luggage storage are common in places popular among tourist - not only in public transport stations.
See screen from Google Maps (Rome):

We may use tag left_luggage=yes if it is not separate amenity, but service offered in office/shop/hotel etc.

Lockers are still common in Germany & France at least, as I’ve used them during SotM and SotM-FR events in the last decade. Not many of these are mapped, for instance DB notes 48 lockers at Tübingen Hbf. Even small manned stations in Switzerland will usually accept luggage (years ago at Engelberg it was snowing and my nephew’s pushchair was an encumbrance so we checked it in, and received a wooden sledge in return). X-ray scanned facilities were the rule in Spain (e.g., at Chamartin station, Madrid), but this was normal practice for bringing a computer into office buildings during the 1990s too).

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I believe luggage storage are common in places popular among tourist - not only in public transport stations.

yes, it is a common service offered to tourists, e.g. by hostels, bike and scooter rentals and similar. This would be mapped as a property on the actual feature, so it’s a different tag.

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Sometimes there are also dedicated offices offering such a service.

But is there any estabilished tagging for it? Would left_luggage=yes work for you?

That hasn’t troubled the scorers at taginfo yet. The concept of left_luggage=customers is pretty standard in hotels and I probably wouldn’t bother tagging directly, but on “other places where you might expect it, and where it’s available to non-customers” it might be useful information.

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I’ve tagged these as amenity=locker locker=luggage office=*
The fact that it’s not self service doesn’t matter too much as long as opening hours are mapped IMO

self service may not be required, but a “locker” is required for this tagging. A left luggage room with service staff and no actual “lockers” cannot be described with these tags.

I’ve not seen such facilities where luggage is simply stored on the floor in a room, but sure that would be a different case. An office in the absence of anything else

I have definitely seen many places where luggage was simply stored near the reception or in a room (possibly locked with a key, but not a “locker”), typical for hostels and hotels, while in luggage rooms at train stations, the luggage is usually tagged and put on shelves (only accessible to/behind the staff normally). From my experience, either there are lockers (self service) or there is staff to take care of the luggage and there are no lockers.

In The Netherlands there are many places that have luggage lockers, like railway stations, libraries, museums etc. In most cases these lockers don’t have to be explicitly tagged in OSM, because usually it is fairly obvious where they are. In museums, libraries etc. these lockers are mainly for small items like handbags and coats and easily findable. In public transport hubs like railway stations there will mainly be large lockers for suitcases etc. that will also be easy to find. In some cases however, luggage lockers are located in awkward places, like in the railway station in my home town Haarlem: not in one of the central hallways on ground level, but hidden at the back of a platform on the first level. In this case it is helpful to tag.The locker was tagged:
amenity=locker
locker=luggage
level=1
count=64

But it was not visible with a symbol on the map. I changed it to:
amenity=luggage_locker
and added
shop=storage_rental
opening_hours=24/7

so it now displays a symbol (Node: 1254951590 | OpenStreetMap)

It is not perfect, but maybe it’s better than office=*?

I was not writing about self-service lockers, but office with service

| kubahahaha
October 3 |

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I was not writing about self-service lockers, but office with service

there is this tag for features
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3Aamenity%3Dleft_luggage

and possibly you can also find it as a property somewhere.

Please, take a look at first post in this thread :slight_smile:
Now I think it’s only tag describing this feature in OSM database

Thanks, yes I know you were talking about staffed luggage stores, but other people commented on lockers in this thread, I should have probably replied to a different post.

As I see it based on this thread, there seems to be four different types of luggage storage available:

  1. Hotels that let their guests drop off luggage on the days they arrive or leave
  2. Businesses (often hotels, but also shops etc) that offer luggage storage services as a side business for non-guests through a service like https://luggagehero.com/
  3. Dedicated manned luggage storage shops
  4. Automated luggage storage lockers (usually 24/7)

Imo we can completely ignore type 1. It’s similar to hotels that offer a toilet for their guests, we don’t map that separately either, it’s assumed that it exists.

The question is how to map the other three. I think there would be two possible approaches:

  • We map the service of accepting luggage as itself, then use a key to define how they operate. Something like amenity=luggage_storage and then luggage_storage=locker luggage_storage=shop luggage_storage=service
  • We map each of them as a separate tag, i.e. amenity=luggage_locker shop=luggage_storage and a side tag on shop=kiosk with luggage_story=yes