Why wheels-free luggage is on a roll

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When Los Angeles-based marketing consultant Michael Williams began thinking about what to pack for a trip to Tuscany earlier this month, he knew he didn’t want the spectre of lost luggage to put stress on the itinerary. So Williams decided to try an “ultralight travel set-up.”

That meant eschewing his standard Rimowa suitcase and packing for the entire five-day trip — tuxedo included — in an Evergoods 35-litre duffel bag.

“I’d travelled through the baggage mayhem last summer, so I was concerned,” he says. “I spent so much time thinking about every single thing I brought in an effort to make the experience as easy as possible.”

All hail the summer of the wheels-free travel bag. As peak-season summer travel gets under way, some frequent flyers are lightening their carry-on-only luggage even further by embracing a wheels-free approach.

Visitors to Dubrovnik’s cobblestoned Old Town are encouraged to carry bags rather than rolling noisy wheeled cases

Wheels-free bags have fans on the tennis court (Jannik Sinner’s Gucci duffel bag was the crossover luxury fashion moment of Wimbledon) and among tourism authorities — in Dubrovnik, they encourage the carrying of bags rather than rolling noisy wheeled cases as a way to show respect to residents of its cobblestoned Old Town.

On TikTok, the aspirational packing gear of the moment isn’t a tower of monogrammed Louis Vuitton cases à la Joan Collins, but a £15.99 polyester duffel from Amazon. The Kono 14-litre duffel weighs 0.3kg and is small enough to adhere to the most stringent budget-airline carry-on size restrictions. (Travelling light: very Gen Z.)

For many travellers, memories of last summer’s airline strikes, flight cancellations and general travel misery — which reached its nadir in record lost-luggage numbers in the US and UK — still linger. I remembered Heathrow’s “enormous luggage carpet” of 2022 when I arrived at Terminal 3 for a trip to the US around 9am last Saturday morning, right around the time a temporary shutdown of luggage belts brought check-ins to a standstill. The auxiliary check-in queue developed its own queue. “Does anyone want to check in but not check a bag?” an airline worker yelled. In my dreams.

“Post-Covid, there was a lot of credibility lost with air travel and losing luggage,” says Felicity McGahan, group chief executive of Australian luggage brand Nere. “A lot of us don’t want to check our bags anymore. It’s a global thing that people want to push more on to the plane.” Nere’s first UK sale was a purple duffel, she adds.

The agility of moving through cobblestoned streets without wheels appeals, but isn’t it also . . . overly backpackery? I can’t shake the suspicion that carrying everything I need for a short trip rather than wheeling it would result in arriving at my destination a sweaty, rumpled mess. With shoulder strain.

“I genuinely prefer not to use a wheelie bag, for so many reasons,” Melissa Morris, founder of London-based luxury leather goods brand Métier, says over Zoom about an hour before flying to the south of France for a three-day retreat with her CEO. Morris is taking a bag of her own design called the Perriand Weekend, which comes with a secret exterior pocket for documents, braided handles for shoulder comfort, and other features that make it “a pleasure to carry” on short trips. “You can move faster. It’s easier finding space in overhead bins. The airlines are a lot nicer.”

At July, a four-year-old luggage brand based in Australia, soft bags account for 18 per cent of units sold so far in 2023 versus 9 per cent last year. Accordingly, one of the brand’s new products in development is a garment bag that trifolds to the size of a large tote. “It fits three outfits and two pairs of shoes — everything you need for a weekend away,” says co-founder Athan Didaskalou. “People have had enough of taking too much stuff with them.”

Sometimes, wheels-free travel is a requirement. When India Clevely, founder of luggage brand London Velvet, spent two months in Kenya last winter, she packed in one of her personalised canvas holdalls to comply with the 15kg weight limit on safari flights.

“Then I got home and went on a business trip to Istanbul to visit my atelier, and this was my luggage again. Now I’m in the south of France and this is all I have for the week,” she says of the Weekend Bag, which has come to represent 45 per cent of London Velvet’s sales since it launched in September 2022.

“The canvas does age much more beautifully than a hard-shell case, you know. It tells a story.”

For marketing consultant Williams, careful planning meant that he packed only one shirt that he didn’t wear during his time in Italy. “It worked out to 95 per cent utilisation, which was pretty great.”

But would he go wheels-free again? Put his Rimowa out to pasture for good? He considers.

“It was more work on the front end, but made the trip itself more enjoyable and easier,” he says. “My whole goal in all of this was not to stress out about any of it. I felt more in control this way, and certainly not open to the pain of the global logistics system. I felt liberated.”

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