The Most Affordable Packing Tool Is Also the Best | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor who has written about pasta-making, running gear, and Wirecutter picks he has spotted on TV shows.

I have just one wardrobe, yet there are two versions of me. New York Alex wears more or less the same uniform every day. Outside of special occasions, you can usually find me in a steady rotation of black jeans, gray T-shirts, navy sweaters, and the occasional chambray button-down.

But Vacation Alex is a dreamer. Vacation Alex yearns for change and novelty. He badly wants to wear those printed rayon shirts that have sat untouched in the back of his closet for years, those vintage olive military trousers, and billowy linen layers in colors reminiscent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper era.

Due to that aspirational thinking, I often wind up packing eight days’ worth of clothes for a three-day trip. And even worse, it provokes a moment of sheer panic the night before my return: I often find myself standing in front of my suitcase, wondering how on earth I’ll be able to cram my entire clown car of clothes back into my suitcase for the flight home.

For years, nothing softened the blow of packing and repacking, not even packing cubes or well-meaning suggestions of packing hacks from my colleagues who pack for a living. But then I discovered what has become my favorite space-saving device ever: plastic compression bags. Suddenly I found myself with the power to shrink all the clothes in my suitcase to one-third of their original size.

This 12-pack of compression bags includes bags of different sizes. They don’t require a pump to seal, and they significantly reduce the volume of clothes for travel.

Compression bags are the most rudimentary packing tool out there. Unlike packing cubes, they have no metal zippers or compartments or dividers. And unlike vacuum bags, they don’t require a pump to suck the air out.

Compression bags are effectively large Ziploc-style bags with a one-way air valve at the bottom. Once the bag is full, you zip it shut and roll it, forcing all the air out through the valve. The result is a densely packed, Café Bustelo–like brick of clothes.

Unpacking is just as easy: To access your clothes, all you have to do is break the vacuum seal by pulling the bag open. That simplicity also makes the bags an excellent choice for multi-location trips, when you might find yourself packing and unpacking your bags several times as you move from place to place.

Compression bags are by far the most affordable space-saving tool, as well. For roughly $15 (about a quarter of the price of a set of three packing cubes), I can get a set of 16 compression bags in various sizes. Because I’ve started using them for seasonal clothing storage at home, I’ve ordered multiple sets, and I’ve tried versions from Alming, Cozy Essential, and Roomipro. The bags from all of those brands are nearly identical and perform similarly.

But their low price by no means makes them single-use items. I have yet to wear out the zipper or the valve on a single bag, or have a bag rip on me, even after compressing and decompressing them sometimes as much as 20 times each over the past two years.

With the help of these compression bags, I was recently able to stuff roughly 13 days’ worth of T-shirts, underwear, and socks into the smallest-size Away Carry On. (I confess that the trip was only eight days long.) According to Away, that bag is best suited for trips lasting three to five days, so I consider this an immense victory for Vacation Alex.

Although even the most haphazard fill-’em-and-squish-’em technique will help you save space, there is an art to making each parcel as small as possible.

After a few trips, I’ve learned that these bags work best when I haven’t egregiously overstuffed them. For example, you can save more space in your suitcase by splitting up 10 T-shirts into two bags with five shirts each rather than putting all 10 into one bag. Overstuffing can make it hard to get all the air out, which defeats the purpose.

I’ve also learned that it’s easier to compress these bags when I don’t mix categories of clothes — socks, for instance, compress into tighter parcels with other socks than when packed with underwear and T-shirts.

I’ve come to rely on the various sizes for different tasks, too. After an airline lost my suitcase in 2019, I became somewhat paranoid about being stuck in any one place without a change of clothes in my carry-on. I now use the very smallest size of compression bag (about as big as a gallon-size freezer bag) to pack an extra day’s worth of clothes into my backpack. Compressed, this parcel comes out to the size of a banana.

I like to use one of the extra-large bags as my dirty-laundry bag on longer trips. Finding ways to pack dirty clothes at the end of a trip can be a hassle, but compression bags make easy work of it. I neatly fold every dirty item of clothing flat into a single bag, which I then compress at the end of my trip. The mega bag of laundry fits perfectly into my suitcase and also quarantines the dirty from the still-clean. (Having extra bags also makes it easy for me to pack clothes I might have purchased while on vacation.)

And if you, like me, are paranoid about bedbugs, having vacuum-sealed dirty laundry allows you to dump your clothes straight into the dryer when you get home, minimizing the risk of letting critters loose in your home.

These bags have one major downside: wrinkles. Fabrics such as thick cotton knits, polyester, and merino are fairly good at shedding creases on their own, so they weather the bags well, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend using these bags for thinner, finer fabrics or any formal clothes you might want looking crisp ahead of an event, especially if you won’t have time to iron. A dress shirt or dress would most definitely come out of compression looking rumpled.

The other, smaller inconvenience is that unlike packing cubes, which have a defined shape, compression bags can often shrink into irregularly shaped parcels. As a result, they don’t necessarily fit neatly into a suitcase, and it may take some Tetris-ing to figure out the right layout. However, they are pliable, and you can fold them or lay them flat depending on which way they’ll fit better into your suitcase.

These compression bags have not solved all of Vacation Alex’s afflictions. I am still generally (though less) afraid of bedbugs. I still become overly maudlin upon departure from basically anywhere. I still completely fail to track my spending when using foreign currencies, even (or especially) those with unfavorable exchange rates. I still manage to catch zero hours of sleep on any red-eye, and I still cannot keep myself from bringing home half a dozen books.

Most notably, I still end up filling my suitcase with stacks of clothes I will probably never work up the nerve to wear, even half a world away from my usual routines. But that is okay. It is the dream of wearing them that matters most — the act of packing visions of a different self into my suitcase with the hope that it will blossom far from home. Usually, the place for dreams in my suitcase is superseded almost entirely by essentials, such as sunscreen and underwear. That is no longer the case. Now, my vacation dreams are bigger and more unfettered than ever before. And so is my bag.

This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.

The simple, well-built Eagle Creek Pack-It Reveal Cube Set is our choice to keep your luggage organized for either a week or a weekend.

If a free carry-on isn’t included in your ticket, don’t pay extra for it. Here’s how you can pack a personal item for a weekend trip.

Struggling to pack for your weekend away? The Cotopaxi Allpa 35L fits so much more than you’d expect.

Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor. He has worked as a journalist and on documentary film projects, and he has also worked as a screenwriter for Amazon and Lionsgate. When he’s not working, you can probably find him bird watching, running, or making pasta.