How we review
The rules
- We buy every bag we write about with our own money. We do not accept review samples, loaners, gifted product or paid placement, and we keep the receipts.
- Use periods and trip counts are real. If a review says a bag went through nine flights and a season of airport tile, that is what happened.
- We do not describe tests we did not run. There is no lab here — no drop rig, no tumble chamber, no force gauge — so you will not read instrument readings.
- Ratings combine three sources, labelled separately on the page: what we observed in our own use, the manufacturer's published specs, and aggregated owner reviews.
How a review gets made
- Pick the category from what readers ask about and what we are about to buy anyway, then buy the bags ourselves at retail.
- Use them on real trips — the specific flights and drives appear in the review — and keep notes as things happen rather than writing from memory.
- Read what other owners report, mostly to find out whether the thing that annoyed us is common or was our own bad luck. Aggregated reviews are labelled as such.
- Check every spec we quote against the manufacturer's own page, because retailer listings are wrong surprisingly often.
- Write the verdict, name the winner, and say who should buy the runner-up instead. Then keep using the bags and update the page when something breaks.
Where this method falls short
- A few people using a bag for a few months is a small sample. It catches the failures that happen early and misses the ones that take three years.
- We cannot test every configuration. Where we only used one size in a line, the review says so.
Corrections
Every page carries the date it was published and the date it was last updated. When we get something wrong, we fix it on the page and say what changed — our default is to correct in place rather than quietly delete. Mail hello@thetravelgearguide.com and it will reach an editor.