You walk into a luggage department and look at a sea of luggage in front of you.
Flipping over a couple of tags you notice one piece is $70 and another of exactly the same size is $700.
What’s the difference? You know there has to be something that justifies that extreme but what exactly that may be puzzles you.
Here then are the basics that should be helpful for you when purchasing luggage.
While there can be some shades of variance in the following explanation, buy following the guideline you will end up with the bags best suited for your kind of travel.
1. The Fabric
There are all kinds of new fabric blends coming out these days that can confuse experts, but for the most part they are still based to some degree on what I term the original three.
Cloth is the first fabric that some luggage is made from. Anyone who travels with public transportation will not want to even look at the cloth selection, if it actually exists in the luggage store you visit.
Some very expensive ‘movie star luggage’ will often be a woven cloth fabric. It looks exceptionally good and can wear well enough. But for the air traveller it is not a good choice.
Buy this luggage for your limousine ride to your overnight destination, but always have ‘you man’ handle it carefully.
Polyester and Polyester blends are perhaps the most common options found in luggage department sets.
Regardless of the material, for many years luggage manufacturers used a word called Denier to highlight the density of weave of the fabrics in their luggage lines.
This density, or denier, was always displayed on the sale tags.
You can still find that measurement on many of the bags but often you have to ask the sales person, if you can find one in a department store.
The higher the Denier the better the luggage, and unfortunately the heavier the luggage will be as well.
Finding the right denier has been the challenge for manufacturers, who often use low Deniers for lead in pricing on luggage I would not recommend to anyone.
For me 600, 900, or 1200 Denier will not hold up for the long run. the tipping point may be at 1200 if you are a once a year traveller but this is not a product for the long haul.
Selecting 1500 or 1800 Denier will last you longer and still be light enough for today’s limited weight restrictions.
The next most common fabric, and far away the best, is Ballistic Nylon.
This is a durable material that when introduced with extremely high Denier factors, was demonstrated on television by shooting a bullet through it. Who knows, maybe that is how they came up with the term Ballistic.
A 1500 Denier Ballistic Nylon will be much better than a 1500 Polyester fabric, and not necessarily heavier.
While almost always more expensive, look first at the Ballistic Nylon if you can afford it.
The high density Ballistic Nylon, while much less than the old days, is still the choice of the daily and weekly road warrior types for whom weight is not as much as issue.
While the new lightweight ‘hardsides’ have come into vogue over the past couple of years, they still are being evaluated. The challenge is they really are not hardsides and while light they have expansion restrictions and each manufacturer seems to be introducing lines where quality varies dramatically from manufacturer to manufacturer
2. Construction
As important is the selection of fabric is the level of construction on a bag. Today’s luggage makers are trying to keep a semblance of quality while reducing the weight that construction quality brings to the bag.
Many have removed almost everything from the frame simply leaving a strong outer wire frame to hold the material.
Some of these wire frames are reasonably effective, while some are just garbage..
Even in the best of them, and there are some, we tell travellers to pack the bag near full all the time.
Ten bags and ten trips on top of a half full wire frame piece of luggage will eventually cause it to bow.
The best is a full honeycomb frame, as a complete three sided plasticized frame is called.
These frames at one time were the Primary reason luggage was sturdy and heavy.
Clever manufacturers like Victorinox and TravelPro, with their Max Lite series, have combined good construction with nylon to make a really excellent light weight durable product.
3. Features
Usually the better quality the luggage, the more features that will be included ‘free’.
it can mean more pockets, suiters, or packing cubes, each one a welcome feature but still requiring manufacturing costs which need to be recovered one way or the other.
This is the short form overview of luggage. I do hope this information is helpful for reaching a conclusion on the kind of luggage that suits your travel needs best.
If you have other questions about luggage feel free to email me at [email protected] I will answer the question for you and post it for other Tripatlas readers as well.