How we judge and rank

A verdict is only useful if you know what produced it. Here is ours.

Where a verdict comes from

Every judgement on this site is built the same way, and it is checkable line by line: we read the specifications, the manuals and the standards that apply to the bag, we weigh what long-term owners consistently report about it, and we name the source of every figure we publish.

That last rule is the one that does the work. A number with a source can be argued with; a number without one is decoration. Where a figure exists in a manual and contradicts the marketing, we quote the manual. Where no reliable figure exists at all, the page says so and leaves the field empty rather than filling it with something plausible.

What we weigh

We rank on the specifications that decide the job and the ones that decide how long it keeps doing it. In practice that means five things:

• The number that governs the bag. The shell material behind a hardside case's drop resistance, the frame type behind a backpack's load transfer, the daily-carry weight behind an empty-weight figure. Where a maker publishes a headline dimension without the one that qualifies it, we say so rather than repeating it.
• The thing that decides whether it stays in use. A wheel that is genuinely stocked as a spare, a lock that carries the real TSA-recognised marking rather than the word alone, a zip that does not need babying after a year. Every category has one detail that decides whether a bag is used or left in a cupboard, and that is the one we describe.
• What is not in the box. The lock a case ships without, the packing cubes a backpack's compartments assume you already own, the compression straps a duffel needs to convert to a comfortable carry. This is weighted more heavily here than on most sites, deliberately: it is the whole gap between a working purchase and a disappointing one.
• Consumables and serviceability. What replacement wheels, zip pulls and handles cost; whether parts are sold separately; whether a manufacturer still supplies them years later. This is why a bag that performs slightly worse sometimes outranks one that performs better.
• Availability where you are. We verify each product reference market by market. A bag that is excellent but not distributed in your country is not a recommendation we can make to you.

Where the evidence comes from

Three sources, weighted differently and always named. Manufacturer specifications and manuals, cited as such rather than repeated as fact — they are reliable for dimensions and unreliable for durability. Published airline and security-authority rules where they exist, always flagged as something to verify with the carrier rather than a guarantee. And the weight of long-term owner reports, which is the only practical source for the question that matters most: what is this bag like in year ten, after the warranty and after the honeymoon?

Where a claim rests on one source rather than three, the page says so. Where we could not source a figure at all, the field is left empty and the gap is stated. We never fill one in by inference.

What the ordering means

We publish no scores. There is no number out of ten on this site, and there never has been — a single figure would have to compare a €400 hardside case with a €15 luggage lock, and it cannot. What we publish instead is an order: within a category, the sequence is deliberate, and the reasons for it are in the text.

Hubs are sorted by price tier — entry, mid, then top — because a hub should read like a budget ladder, not a list with the most expensive case nailed to the top.

The biases we designed against

Affiliate sites drift towards expensive products, towards whatever is newest, and towards whatever converts. Our defence is structural rather than a promise: no ranking on this site has ever been reordered because of what a product pays, several pages recommend a €15 accessory instead of a new bag, and no product has ever been placed in exchange for anything.

The one bias we cannot remove is availability. We cover what is genuinely purchasable across Amazon's US, UK, German, French, Italian and Spanish stores, which means excellent luggage sold only through specialist travel-goods retailers is under-represented here. Where that matters to the recommendation, the page says so.

A bag is a bag, not a destination

Every specification on this site describes a piece of luggage — capacity, weight, shell material, cabin dimensions — and we handle every one of them the same way: we report the bag and we stop there. A compliance note like "fits most European carry-on sizers" is a mechanical fact, not a guarantee for a specific airline on a specific day. We publish no destination guides, no itineraries and no packing lists built around a trip. Those are questions for the traveller's own plans and, where relevant, the carrier's own rules, and no page on this site substitutes for a specific airline's current published policy.

For the same reason there is nothing here about where to go, when to go, or who a given bag is "for" beyond the kind of trip it is sized for. Those are questions about travel. This site is about the bag.

Where this site stops

We write about equipment. We give no destination advice, and where a manufacturer or an airline publishes a dimension, a weight limit or a liquids rule, we report the figure and leave the interpretation alone. Pages that touch the boundary say so in the text rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom.