What Luggage Stickers Owe to the Grand Hotels
Some of the best-looking luggage ever made was covered in other people’s advertising. A century ago, a well-traveled steamer trunk carried labels from grand hotels in Cairo, Venice and Rio, and those early luggage stickers, as we’d call them now, were small works of design in their own right.
The look still turns up now and then on a modern hard-shell case, usually as a custom label or two. It helps to know where the idea came from.
When the Bellhop Did the Branding
The steamer trunk emerged in the 1870s, and the label appeared not long after. According to the introduction to Letterform Archive’s Hotel Retro, it was a decorative tag that bellhops stuck onto guests’ luggage, a memento for the traveler and a clever piece of marketing for the hotel.
The earliest versions were plain. Collector and historian João-Manuel Mimoso, as cited by the Archive, describes them as little more than slips of paper with a hotel’s name and address, sometimes a sketch of the building.
Then printing caught up. As lithography improved around the turn of the twentieth century, hotels began commissioning full-color labels with die-cut edges and striking lettering. A trunk carrying Cairo, Venice and Rio on its sides told people where its owner had been without a word being said.
Small Labels, Serious Design
Letterform Archive in San Francisco keeps thousands of these labels, dated from 1920 to 1970. Many came from San Francisco’s Huntington Hotel, which opened in 1922, where a concierge assembled a binder of favorites. Nobody recorded the concierge’s name.
Nobody recorded most of the designers’ names, either. That’s a little maddening, because the work is good.
Budapest’s Hotel Duna arranged the letters of its name into an isometric drawing of the building itself, with an awning doubling as the crossbar of the A. The Hotel Alhambra Palace in Granada worked Moorish arches and geometric motifs into its lettering. Rio’s Copacabana Palace showed its white beach dotted with umbrellas, and the Royal Danieli in Venice borrowed the flat shapes and limited palette of poster art.
A few makers did get credit. The Archive names the Naples print house Richter & Co., which under art director Mario Borgoni dominated European tourism graphics from 1900 to 1930. American magazine illustrator Dan Sweeney also signed his 1920s labels for high-end hotels in China.
The decline came gradually. Both world wars disrupted travel in Europe, and as more long-distance passengers took to the air in the middle of the century, the heavy steamer trunk lost its place and the label tradition faded with it. Trains and ocean liners kept running, but the period often called the Golden Age of Travel, which Letterform Archive places at roughly 1870 to 1940, was winding down.
Where the Old Labels Live Now
Collectors held on to them, thankfully. The Newberry Library in Chicago keeps an album of 395 hotel luggage labels inside its Geller collection of hotel postcards and labels. Most of the labels come from England, Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the former Czechoslovakia, and researchers can view the album in the Special Collections Reading Room.
The house of Vuitton has its own trove. Gaston-Louis Vuitton, grandson of Louis Vuitton and a trunk maker himself, amassed some 3,000 hotel labels, according to Atelier EXB, the publisher of Francisca Mattéoli’s book Escales autour du Monde. The publisher says more than 800 of them, now kept in the House of Vuitton archives, appear in that book.
Then, in 2026, Letterform Archive published Hotel Retro, reproducing 330 of its labels as removable stickers on uncoated paper. Readers can peel them off and put them on a suitcase, which is what the originals were for, though the reproductions are a different object from both the period labels and a modern vinyl sticker.
Making Your Own, With Some Restraint
Reproductions are charming. Still, some travelers would rather carry a label that means something to them: the name of a family house, a boat, a ski chalet, a wedding weekend, a members’ club. It’s the same move the grand hotels made, just pointed at your own story instead of someone else’s lobby.
The trick is to think like those anonymous designers. One strong idea. Lettering you can read from across a baggage hall. A shape that suits the image, rather than a default white rectangle.
Ask to see a proof before anything prints. Online shops like stickerbeat send a digital mockup after checkout, and that’s the moment to check whether a fine serif still reads at two inches wide or whether the thin lines in your crest turn to mush at small sizes. A proof gives you the layout and a reasonable sense of color, though colors on a screen may not match the printed sticker exactly. It also can’t promise how every hairline will reproduce, so high-resolution, print-ready artwork matters just as much.
Material deserves some thought too. The historical labels were printed paper, a different thing from today’s vinyl. For a modern suitcase, durable vinyl is often a practical choice on smooth, hard-shell surfaces, though adhesion depends on the finish and texture of the case, so testing a small piece somewhere discreet is sensible.
Beyond the Suitcase
Luggage is the obvious home for these labels, but it isn’t the only one. The hotel-label look has a way of drifting onto anything that travels.
Think of a destination wedding welcome bag sealed with a small round label carrying the couple’s initials and the name of the villa. Or the gear cases on a boat, marked with the vessel’s name in the same lettering painted on the transom. Ski families sometimes do the same with boot bags and helmet cases, which tend to look identical in a crowded chalet mudroom.
Then there are the collectors. Some people who buy vintage steamer trunks prefer to leave the original labels untouched and add a single new label of their own, a quiet note that the trunk is still in service.
A private club or a small hotel could take the same cue. A guest who leaves with a well-designed label tucked into their key folder may well stick it on something, and the property ends up traveling with them. That’s the arrangement the grand hotels had a hundred years ago, only now the guest gets to choose whether to play along.
None of this needs to be loud. The old labels did their work at a few inches across, and most of these uses can too.
Keeping the Case Considered
A few habits tend to separate a considered case from a cluttered one:
Go small. Two to four inches is often plenty. Part of the vintage appeal is how much those labels said in so little space.
Limit the typefaces. One, maybe two. Some of the best old labels relied on lettering alone.
Leave the tags alone. Keep stickers clear of your ID tag and any airline barcode label so they stay readable.
Mind the surface. Smooth polycarbonate or aluminum tends to give a sticker a better grip than fabric or textured leather, though finishes vary from case to case.
Try the layout before peeling. Arrange the stickers with painter’s tape, backing still attached. Vinyl that gets pulled up and reapplied can stretch or lose its grip.
How many to use is a matter of taste. One carefully chosen label can look entirely deliberate on a good case, while some people prefer three or four placed with a little asymmetry, so the case reads more like a record of where it’s been. Either works when the restraint shows.
The Point Was Never the Sticker
The hotel labels lasted because people kept them: a concierge with a binder, a trunk maker with thousands, a library in Chicago with an album. They were advertising, but they were also careful design made for something that moved, and that pairing is why they still hold attention a century later.
