Best Travel Backpacks
I evaluated 10 packs that can be stuffed under the seat in front of you on most airplanes. The best of them do double duty as daypacks once you land, too.
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There’s one choice for me when it comes to the best travel backpack, but it took me years to figure it out. According to United Airlines, I have earned over 700,000 lifetime miles aboard its aircraft. Most of them were not for pleasure trips, alas, but for my work as a freelance journalist.
The Patagonia Black Hole Mini MLC easily accommodated all of my gear, proving that it's worthy of its name.
Editor’s Choice: Patagonia Black Hole Mini MLC
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Price: $169
Where to buy: Patagonia
Specs: 12.25x19.5x6 inches; 2.7 pounds
Claimed capacity: 26 liters
Quick take: It’s comfy, big, and perhaps the most versatile pack of them all.
Read my full review of the Patagonia Black Hole Mini MLC.
Best for Business Travel: Incase EO Travel Backpack
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Other Travel Backpacks We Evaluated
These four travel backpacks from Yeti, Topo Designs, Thule, and Amazon Basics are great for different reasons. Consider them based on such factors as lightness, interior organization, and affordability.
Yeti Crossroads 27L
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Price: $229.99
Where to buy: Yeti.com
Specs: 19.75×12×9 inches; 3.6 pounds
Claimed capacity: 27 liters
Quick take: More for pleasure than business, but one of the most comfortable bags for carrying.
Topo Designs Global Briefcase
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Price: $129
Where to buy: Topodesigns, Amazon
Specs: 15.5x11.5x4 inches; 2.2 pounds
Capacity: 14 liters
Quick take: Cute and lightweight, but not quite up to the task of holding a heavy load.
Thule Crossover Backpack 32L
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Amazon Basics Carry-On Travel Backpack
Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photos: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
Price: $53.83
Where to buy: Amazon
Specs: 21.5x15.75x8.25 inches; 3.83 pounds
Claimed capacity: 45 liters
Quick take: It has all the design elan of a Soviet housing block. But it’s very budget-friendly and fairly large. (Don’t pack it too full or it may not fit under the seat.)
Read my full review of the AmazonBasics Carry-On Travel Backpack.
How I Evaluated These Travel Backpacks
Because these bags are meant to sneak aboard an airliner as your personal item, my editors and I felt it was important to check their “stowability” in a typical underseat area. The thing is, unlike with carry-on bags meant to fit in an overhead compartment, there’s no standard measurement for the space under coach airline seats. It varies from airline to airline, as well as from plane to plane within an airline’s fleet.
Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
So we used United’s regulations, which permit a maximum of 9x10x17 inches for under-seat bags, and built a plywood box to those dimensions. We also thought it was important to simulate the in-flight experience of fitting the bags beneath the seats and removing them, propping them in a lap, retrieving contents, and stowing them again.
We also fashioned a wooden facsimile of a seatback using the pitch measurements from a diagram on the website of the Federal Aviation Administration that an FAA spokesperson confirmed was representative of the coach seating configuration on many planes. The rough average is about 30 to 32 inches between seats when measured from the top of one seatback to the top of the next (which is how the airlines measure such things). This can amount to as little as a meager 2 inches or so of knee room, depending on how long your legs are.
I’m called my fledgling carrier Plywood Air. I thought the honest tagline “Exactly What You’re Expecting” was very refreshing!
A bulky bag like the one from Amazon Basics could be a tight squeeze. Packed full, it may need to go overhead.
The way airlines squeeze rows so tightly together means your feet are frequently invading that space meant for luggage—because there’s really no choice. In my evaluations of packs ranging between 15.5 and 21.5 inches in length, only the shortest ones completely fit in the plywood bin, and even so, my shoes still overlapped the box. The FAA spokesperson warned that it’s up to the airlines to determine the amount of space needed for passengers to get to the aisle, and you’ll see in my reviews mentions of bags that a flight attendant might ask you to stow in the overhead bin instead.
We also considered comfort. Would the backpack dig into your spine or mold to your body so you barely notice it’s there? These things matter whether you’re traipsing through airports or using it to stash souvenirs and carry a map, raincoat, and sweater once you’ve arrived.
To find that out, I spent a few weeks carrying these backpacks plus pedaling them around on an e-bike, sometimes in the rain to see if they did okay with downpours (short answer—yes, mostly) and playing tourist in my town in the Hudson Valley region of New York, shopping at the greenmarket and using the packs to carry groceries, and strolling the supermarket and the local Lowe’s. How is that any different from being stuck during a 2-hour delay at JFK? For one thing, nobody’s nearly as cranky. Also, nobody’s wrapped your fruit in 15 layers of plastic or wants to charge you $12 for a beer.
About These Travel Backpacks
So what are the qualities of a hardworking travel backpack? All the bags we chose for this evaluation had to:
- Accommodate in an organized way everything you’d need to be comfortable/productive/entertained onboard a plane and whatever spillover there might be from your carry-on.
- Function as the go-to bag when you get to your destination, whether that be a day hike in the mountains or a business meeting in a boardroom.
- Do double duty as a quick overnight bag, fitting a change of clothes and a second pair of sneakers or slippers.
- Feel comfortable for long stretches of time.
- Fit (with a bit of creative shoving and squishing) within the roughly 9x10x17-inch space underneath the typical airline seat.
In terms of price, the most expensive pack cost $300, while the Amazon Basics crept only slightly above $50. But the mean price of roughly $150 suggests that you don’t have to spend a fortune. Materials, carrying comfort, internal organization, and structure also varied widely among the backpacks and didn’t necessarily correlate to price. And bigger wasn’t necessarily better: Filling the largest pack to capacity could leave you with a bag that was impossible to stuff under the seat.
Which Travel Backpack Should You Pick?
While this very much depends on your personal priorities, I think there are a few things most people would agree that they look for in a travel backpack. It should be well organized, with lots of slots for smaller items. A bag that’s one empty maw can leave you constantly frustrated trying to retrieve what you need.
It should have enough structure so that it’s not just a sack with shoulder straps; structure helps stabilize the pack, so you’re not using your muscles with every step to prevent the load from squishing around. And it should be fairly burly, with oversized zippers and handles, so you can open and close compartments just by feel and with operational ease.
All of that pointed me toward one backpack, the Patagonia Black Hole Mini MLC, for its winning combination of size, utility, comfort, and sturdiness. Though it didn’t quite measure up to the Patagonia, another standout was the Incase EO Travel Backpack for the business traveler.
Capacity and Functionality
Below you can see the items I typically pack, and also an alternative, a tidier packing list from my wife, an academic who doesn’t have to bring as much as I do on the road. Her contents fit without drama into every pack I evaluated. My contents? Not so much. Literally. The total heft of what I chose to carry tipped the scales at 17.5 pounds. That shocked me because nothing on my list felt particularly porky. But it all adds up, which is precisely the point of doing this sort of evaluation.
We’ve included whether or not a pack includes an external water bottle holder (because that’s just handy), a dedicated spot for glasses, and niceties like a key hook and exterior grab handles, as well as available waist and sternum straps that really help distribute weight.
No bag is perfect; some had extra capacity but were a difficult squeeze, piling out over my shoes. Others were likewise plenty capacious but shimmed into that cubby a little more artfully, typically because they weren’t too wide, just long. And some couldn’t hold everything but slid easily into the underseat storage area. Whether it’s better to have a smaller bag that can’t hold all your stuff but is easy to cram in front of your Converses or take a larger bag that will hold everything but might end up in the overhead is a personal choice every backpack-toting traveler has to make on their own.
My Packing List
Medications and Personal-Care Products
I like to have an over-the-counter pain reliever handy. (Prescription meds should always go in a carry-on because checked bags can go missing.)
Dopp kit
Earplugs
Eyeglasses
Eyeshade
Hand sanitizer
Lip balm
Masks (one isn’t enough for comfort reasons alone)
Moisturizer
Tissues
Clothing and Accessories
Dress shirt (in case I’m forced to gate-check that roll-aboard and for whatever reason it’s not there when I land)
Fleece
Slippers/spare shoes (on a really long flight I like the option of changing footwear)
Sunglasses
Tech
Camera
Charging cables/converters/USBs/adapters (I carry all these in a single pouch)
Laptop
Noise-canceling headphones/in-ear buds
Portable battery pack for charging devices
Tablet
Food/Drink
Chocolate
Snacks
Water bottle
Reading and Writing
Book/guidebook
Magazine
Notebook
Pens and pencils
Miscellaneous
Gum
Passport
Tiny headlamp, which can work better than the overhead one for reading on flights
Tiny TSA-safe multitool
Umbrella
Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
My Wife’s Packing List
Personal-Care Products
Basic makeup kit
Computer glasses
Hand sanitizer
Toiletries kit
Clothing and Accessories
Sunglasses
Wrap
Tech
Chargers
Earbuds
Laptop
Phone
Food/Drink
Snacks
Water bottle
Reading and Writing
Book
Filofax
Legal pad
Pens
Miscellaneous
Gum and mints
Knitting
Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller Photo: Michael Frank and Mark Miller
