47 listings · Six categories
Every listing here was read for what it states and what it does not. Where a figure is given we repeat it and say who said it. Where a figure is missing we leave the gap visible, because a plausible estimate printed on a page like this gets quoted back as a measurement.
The list we were given had one item in it twice and several items filed under the wrong heading. The duplicate appears once. The strays have been moved, and each page says which ones moved and why.
No airline reviews luggage in advance. There is no register of approved models and no body that certifies a bag as admissible. Eight of the forty-seven listings on this site point the word at the bag or the cover anyway.
TSA does not certify luggage sizes at all. The scheme those words belong to is a lock standard, which is why the phrase means nothing printed on a fabric cover with no lock in it. One listing here does use it of an actual lock, and that one is not counted among the empty claims above.
The figure that settles it is the one your carrier publishes, for your fare, on the aircraft you are flying. We print no size limits here, because ours would be wrong for somebody on the day they read it.
9 listings
The job: passing a frame it has never met, with the wheels on
A cabin case is the only bag on this site that has to pass a physical test in public. Everything else is judged by how it packs or how it survives; this one gets put inside a metal frame while a queue watches, and the frame has no opinion about the listing.
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4 listings
The job: surviving a belt and still opening in a hotel room
A checked case has an easier public life and a harder private one. Nobody measures it in front of a queue. Instead it is thrown, stacked, dropped down a chute and dragged along a rubber belt by a machine that has no idea which way up it is.
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9 listings
The job: shape without structure, and where that helps
A duffel has no shape of its own. It takes the shape of what is in it, which is the reason it fits into a gap a case would refuse and the reason it slumps in a sizer where a case would stand up straight.
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13 listings
The job: weight on your back instead of in your hand
Moving the load from your hand to your back changes how the weight feels and changes nothing about how much of it there is. A pack you can carry down a jet bridge is still a pack that has to go somewhere once you sit down.
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10 listings
The job: volume, which is not the same as weight
This is the category where one sentence does most of the work: compression reduces the volume a load occupies and does not reduce its mass. Squeezing four shirts into half the space leaves you with four shirts. Airlines weigh bags.
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2 listings
The job: a layer over the shell, and what the label on it means
A luggage cover is a stretch sleeve you pull over a hard case. It keeps scuffs off the shell and makes an anonymous black case findable on a belt, and those are both real, modest benefits.
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