Send luggage from Tokyo to Osaka by Yamato transport

5 comments

1. Yes, you can designate the date and time of delivery (up to 7 days) when you ship your luggage.

2. Yep, its a really useful way to do it. But why are you collecting it and not getting it delivered?

3. What do you mean by storing it and collect it later?

   U can only deliver it to somewhere where someone is available to receive the suitcase. U can specify the desired date of arrival for the suitcase, so Yamato will store it at their distribution center and only deliver the final leg when it’s time.

   So, your option will be to send it from your hotel in Tokyo to Osaka and ask for it to arrive on the day you check in. There are also a Yamato office at the airport, so u can also send it to your hotel in Osaka from the airport

4. Yes up to 7 days IIRC.

   When I did this, I asked the reception staff for help to fill out the forms, in both cases they actually called the next hotel ahead of time and told them I was arriving later, one of the hotels said they could hold the luggage for a couple of days and the other one said they couldn’t.

   In the second case we actually just wrote the date we wanted our luggage to arrive at the hotel in the form.

   My best advice for you is to talk to your hotel staff and get help, most hotels have this service and deal with it daily. The forms should be written in kanji for the most part and they actually know how to do everything properly and of course the service in Japan is just on another level, so they will do everything they can to help you.

5. We just did this last week, except sending directly from Kyoto to Tokyo while we spent 3 days in Osaka. It was really efficient and easy, would definitely recommend!

   You can specify the day and time you want the luggage delivered (no extra charge to hold your luggage a few days). The times are in two hour intervals starting from the morning. We picked the latest delivery time 19.00-21.00 (giving us time to check in and go grab dinner), and our luggage arrived at 8pm with no issues. It was also very well wrapped to prevent damage. If your airbnb is easy to find, there’s no issues getting it delivered — our Tokyo airbnb was an easy to find house; however, our Osaka accommodation was a hard to find apartment and the courier wasn’t able to find it (friend forgot an item and our Kyoto hotel tried to forward it to us in Osaka through Yamato — we ended up getting the package forwarded to Tokyo and picking it up from a centre.)

   The only snag we had was that, as our Kyoto hotel wasn’t signed up to Yamato’s luggage forwarding service, we had to figure out how to send ourselves. We thought it would be easy to send through the 7-11 or Family Mart convenience stores close by, but it turns out both conbini have a size limit for the luggage that can be sent (combined dimensions 160cm). Luckily the Yamato Tak-Q-Bin Centre was only a 15min walk away, and we were able to send it from the centre straightforwardly. The Centre was also more loose on the dimensions and didn’t bother weighing our suitcases either; the Centre put our suitcases down as 160cm while I think the conbini were much more strict. The other thing to note is that the Yamato Centre we went to had cash or IC card payment only — I think it ended up about ¥2500 per large suitcase from memory (maybe prepare ¥3000).

   The other odd thing was that the Family Mart staff insisted we fill out the form in Japanese, including writing the address in Japanese. In contrast to Yamato’s website which says you can write in English (including address in English/romaji). I can write Japanese so it didn’t affect us much, but you might want to have on hand the address for your airbnb in Japanese, in case you also get this requirement. The form is also only in Japanese, but you can google online to find translations/explanations of the various areas/boxes to tick.

   Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.