Are you off to a new country but have not been abroad for a while? Want to get the lowdown on how to pack a suitcase efficiently without burning a great big hole in your pocket?
Well, you are in the right place, for today we will be exploring some of the best ways to economize on all of the space you have available, as well as how to choose the right luggage space!
How to Pack a Suitcase: 12 Tips for the Trade
What follows are 12 bold and bodacious tips that are going to help you save space while allowing you to respect the contents of your suitcase efficiently.
1. Fold and Roll
Among regular travelers, the idea of rolling clothes instead of folding them is about as ubiquitous as coffee. And yet, there is still debate over which is the best to pack clothes through the conservation of space.
If you want to give rolling a try to save storage space, then the best way to go about it is to fold the garment into a rectangular shape first.
2. Packing Cubes
Regular travelers swear by these nifty mathematical inventions, but what exactly are they?
They are shapes of various sizes that allow for the compacting of clothes into a suitcase, conveniently shaped to fit the dimensions of the luggage. Essentially a plastic bag, a packing cube will act as a mediator and organizational figurehead for your packing list, dividing all of the various parts up into sections that can be easily navigated on the fly.
Oh, and these plastic bags keep all your t-shirts and other clothes about as wrinkle-free as you are going to get while traveling in this way.
3. The Right Luggage
Now, finding the best travel bag is an art all of its own. No matter how efficiently you pack and how closely you follow any packing tips, you are going to come up short if you are using, say, a leather duffle bag when you really need a suitcase.
A harder suitcase can make the process of compacting the packing list into the available luggage space, leaving more space in your carry-on luggage for added extras. A softer fabric bag will keep evading your grasp.
4. Space Management
Though it can easily be missed throughout the packing process, there are several key points of the suitcase where unused space lurks like silence. For one, when packing, say, an extra pair of shoes, there is often space in the shoes themselves left void and gaping.
This very space could be used for the storing of socks, for example, allowing for the space that those socks would otherwise have occupied to be used for something else more meaningful. Small touches like this eventually add up, leaving plenty more space on a business trip to steal those hotel room freebies.
5. Travel-Sized Items
One of favorite little things about traveling is the size of the toiletries that are permitted on flights.
These small touches are some of the few things that make you truly feel like a little kid again, even if only in the sense that you are holding a tube of toothpaste that, when you were a child, would have looked normal size relative to how a normal tube of toothpaste looks in your adult hand.
This, however, is not entirely limited to toiletries, for there are plenty of other items like hairbrushes and towels that come specifically in sizes ready for traveling with.
6. Multi-Purpose
In the same way, it will also be of use to bring items that do not only perform one single function but rather that can do at least two or more things.
This kind of packing strategy will save a whole load of space in the long run and is also the kind of philosophy that a lot of people could also apply to their daily lives. For the musicians among us, this will be of the utmost importance as a piece of worldly advice.
7. Clothes
Thanks to many innovations in the manufacture of clothing, warm garments no longer have to be big and bulky to be warm. Rather, science has allowed for the creation of fabrics that are designed to retain warmth better than other natural materials could, relative to their size and weight of course.
Therefore, you can easily and relatively affordably go out and purchase lightweight variants of all of the items of clothing you were thinking of bringing along for the journey. Packing neutral colors and paying attention to the choice of fabric will help you to pack light while also fitting in with a number of different sartorial situations.
8. Shoes
When it comes to learning how to pack a suitcase, there are scarcely more potent bains to your progress than the bulk and braun of shoes. Thanks to their awkward shape and sometimes great heft, shoes are easily one of the most annoying things to have to pack.
It is for this reason that many more-seasoned travelers will advise you to cut down as much as possible on the number of shoes you bring along for the ride.
Unless you are going for business reasons, all you really need is one or two pairs of footwear, with variations of style depending on the climate.
9. What You Need
Easier said than done, but learning what you need for a trip away is a fast track to learning how to pack a suitcase.
If you begin by writing a packing list, you can then progress by considering which of these items you are most definitely going to use while you are away.
Anything that breeds doubts in your mind will need to be brought in for questioning, only added to the final lineup if there is enough space at the end.
10. The Bulk of the Journey
If you are traveling by plane, then this will be an apt point for you to wear your most heavy items on the flight instead of packing them away. Picture the last time you went away by plane - do you remember them weighing you before you went onto the plane?
Of course not, for that is only the reserve of the luggage itself. To put it bluntly, you are not luggage nor are you baggage, no matter how much we all might feel like it from time to time.
11. Toiletries
Choosing the right Dopp kit - or, travel toiletry bag - for the job is an art all its own. For all their usefulness to the cause, they would be entirely useless if they were too bulky for the job and took up too much space, for example.
If you use a Dopp kit that is larger than it needs to be then you are more likely to fill it with things that you do not necessarily need and that you might not otherwise have taken away with you.
Likewise, you will want a Dopp kit that is a friendly size for whatever suitcase you are using, so choose according to your own luggage.
12. Adapters
You can save space in the most unlikely of spaces. Thinking about travel adapters, you might feel as though these are items on the packing list that really cannot be messed with, these are necessities.
And yet, with the advance of technology, there are now adapters that can accommodate more than one user, sporting at least two USB ports and/or powerpoints.
This is all alongside the fact that the heft and shape of adapters have themselves been streamlined as the years have gone by, perhaps to an extreme degree since the last time you traveled abroad.
Last Words
So, there you have it! Hopefully, this digestible study of how to pack a suitcase has been of some use to you in preparing for your own journey wherever it is that you are headed.
If you still have a burning question, do not hesitate to drop a comment below and we will get to answering your cries as soon as we can!
FAQs How to Pack a Suitcase
Is it better to fold or roll clothes in a suitcase?
This debate seems to be everlasting, from the very first time such innovations in packing were introduced up until the present day. Some might, for instance, argue that folding clothes preserves the essential shape of the item in a way that rolling does not. Equally, a detractor might retort that such a belief is unfounded.
Logic does, in fact, suggest that rolling puts fewer creases into the original article of clothing. Even still, the best way to roll clothes for packing is to fold them into a rectangular shape to begin with, thus eradicating any extremist answers to this debate on both sides. Sadly, there has not been much academic or scientific study into the particulars of this debate, so we must draw our own conclusions and act accordingly.
