Owning a well-made, thoughtfully designed suitcase or bag can help make traveling feel breezy and manageable. The trick to avoiding lousy luggage is by traveling with as many different carry-ons, spinners, suitcases, backpacks and convertible bags as you can lay your hands on. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the time or money to invest in this sort of research. Fortunately, your curious friends at Reviewed do.
No matter whether you prefer to travel light or insist upon bringing every scrap of clothing you own on your next adventure, we’ve got the perfect travel bag for you.
Best Checked Luggage
Travelpro Platinum Magna 2 29" Expandable Spinner Suiter
Best Carry-On Luggage
Samsonite Flexis 21" Spinner
Best Under Seat Carry-On Luggage
Tom Bihn Western Flyer
How We Tested
What You Should Know About Luggage
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Travelpro's Platinum Magna 2 is the best suitcase to invest in right now. It’s made well enough that it’ll survive years of vacations, trips back and forth from university, or extended business travel.
The Flexis 21 features tough, nimble wheels that should last for years of hard use. I found that they made crossing over the sun-cracked pavement, concrete sidewalks, wood floors and tile comfortable and easy.
With 1600 cubic inches of interior space, the Western Flyer is large enough to use as a small suitcase for a weekend getaway with room to spare for a laptop, snacks, and magazines.
When it comes to getting carry-on luggage on a flight, size matters. To ensure that the carry-on suitcases and underseat carry-on bags that we called in for testing would be welcomed on the greatest number of airlines across North America, we researched the allowable bag sizes for each major airline, averaged the numbers and then, in the name of caution, looked for bags that were slightly smaller than the measurements we came up with: 22 x 14 x 9 inches for carry-on bags and 8 x 18 x 14 inches for underseat-sized carry-on luggage. Full-sized suitcases, designed to hold week’s worth of clothing and too large to be stowed anywhere but in an aircraft’s cargo hold aren’t held back by the same sort of sizing restrictions, in most cases. While researching which of these larger pieces of luggage to call in, we paid attention to a brand’s reputation for quality, price and complaints/kudos that we saw online about a given model of suitcase time and time again.
To ensure that a set of wheels or a handle wouldn’t keep the carry-on luggage that we called in for testing from being allowed on a flight, we built our own versions of airport baggage sizing devices. Any bag that refused to fit was quickly disqualified from the competition.
For carry-on bags designed to fit into an airliner’s overhead bin and full-sized suitcases equipped with wheels we looked to mobility: each bag was tested by wheeling it over a quarter-mile of varying surfaces: tile, hardwood, concrete and cracked sidewalks. For every 20 steps taken with the bag, a 360-degree turn was performed to ensure that the suitcase’s wheels were still spinning freely and to make onlookers wonder exactly what we were up to. To simulate having to navigate an airport check-in line, each piece of wheeled luggage was rolled through an obstacle course of tables and chairs. We also tested how easily each suitcase was to use while ascending and descending a flight of stairs.
For baggage that doesn’t come equipped with wheels—backpacks and duffle bags, for example—we looked to how comfortable their handles, backpack and shoulder straps proved to be while carrying each bag, fully loaded, with as many pieces of clothing and toiletries as possible.
In addition to these tests, we also considered the durability of each piece of luggage, whether its built-in storage options were more of a help than a hindrance, small but important touches such as whether or not the bag can be used with a TSA-approved luggage lock and whether it comes with any thoughtful extras such as a laundry bag and, finally, how stylish and adaptable each bag proved to be.
When it comes to getting carry-on luggage on a flight, size matters.
When it comes to luggage, we advise you to spend more if you travel more. High-end luggage tends to be more durable, so you’ll have to replace it less often.
Seamus Bellamy is Reviewed's Updates Editor and resident expert on travel-related technology.
See all of Seamus Bellamy's reviewsWe use standardized and scientific testing methods to scrutinize every product and provide you with objectively accurate results. If you’ve found different results in your own research, email us and we’ll compare notes. If it looks substantial, we’ll gladly re-test a product to try and reproduce these results. After all, peer reviews are a critical part of any scientific process.
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