🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

I’ve been fortunate to travel ✈ a lot over the last 20 years, both professionally and personally.

One thing I’ve refined over many years is my so-called “carry on only” baggage game for work trips specifically. This is where you only take carry-onto-the-plane baggage and no checked-into-the-plane-hold baggage.

The idea being on busy trips you substantially reduce the chance of your checked baggage going missing, or not getting transferred onto a tight connection, which can throw a tightly planned itinerary into disarray.

First up, should acknowledge this is only feasible for some people and in some situations: if you’re travelling with your family, have a health condition that requires extra equipment, or need to take items on your trip that are only allowed in checked baggage, just for example, this is not viable. And what I need to take will be different to what others have to take.

But for when you can attempt carry on only, there’s a lot of simple tricks and items that can make your life that much easier, which I cover in this video, made “authentically” in my New York City hotel room, in the middle of my current two week work trip touring around the USA.

Please reshare if useful 🙏

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Carry On Only
📌 (0:39) Key Motivations
📌 (1:20) Only Suitable in Some Situations
📌 (2:36) The Bag Situation
📌 (3:57) Vacuum Bags
📌 (5:15) Toiletries Bag and Contents
📌 (6:42) Passport Wallets
📌 (7:20) Noise Cancelling Headphones
📌 (7:58) Power Banks, Cables and Adaptors
📌 (9:03) Document Folder
📌 (9:25) Laundry Bag
📌 (9:52) Folding a Business Shirt
📌 (11:23) Folding Jackets
📌 (12:02) Comfortable Pants
📌 (13:12) Fabric Shopping Bag
📌 (13:44) Lip Balm
📌 (13:50) Backup Alarm
📌 (14:19) Pandemic and Health Items
📌 (15:03) Antibacterial Wipes
📌 (15:29) Antibacterial Wipes
📌 (15:54) Quickly Removable Footwear
📌 (16:08) Bags as Packed
📌 (16:15) Summary

Full Video Transcript

Hi everyone! I’m in my New York City hotel room, halfway through a two-week trip for work around the USA, and I thought I would do a video on how I go about traveling carry-on only. Carry-on only, of course, meaning that you do not check your bags at the airport; you pack such that you can carry all of your bags onto the plane. I’ll talk a bit about why I try and do this whenever possible, talk about some of the factors that may stop you from doing it, and run you through how I go about packing my bags to enable this to happen.

So first up, why would you try and do carry-on only baggage when you’re traveling for work? Well, often when you’re traveling for work, you have a fairly tight schedule. You’re packing in visits or meetings, you’ve got some tight airport connections, and you want to minimize the amount of time you spend away from home. One of the problems with checking in baggage is that checked baggage can get lost, it can miss connecting flights, and it’s an extra complicating factor that can interfere with your travel plans. So, if you can remove that factor where possible, it can increase the chances that you’ll have a relatively smoothly running trip.

This video is only applicable in certain situations: so firstly, only when you’re traveling by yourself. When I travel with my family and my kids, all bets are off – we have checked-in baggage most of the time, and that’s a very different situation. Another thing about carry-on only packing is that it imposes some restrictions on what you can bring. You obviously can’t bring certain types of items onto the plane; some of them have to be checked in, if for no other reason than just for bulk or weight reasons. There are usually limitations on size and weight in terms of what you can carry on the plane. If you have certain medical or health conditions that require you to bring a lot of extra gear, then carry-on only understandably is probably not going to be an option for you.

In my particular case, my carry-on strategy relies on you being reasonably physically capable because you are not going to be using roller bags, and I’ll explain why in a second, which means you’re going to be lugging relatively light bags around, often for relatively long periods of time. Once again, that’s not for everyone; this is only for a certain subset of people who really want to prioritize and can prioritize carry-on only bags.

So, these are the two bags that I would carry with me on a longer work trip, more than say a day or two. This is my personal bag, which is a typical sort of satchel bag. You can fit a laptop in it, some documents, some headphones, etc., your passports, and some other material. This is the one that would typically go under the seat in front of you when you’re on the plane. This is the larger bag – I choose to use an over-the-shoulder or carryable duffel bag. You can also use a backpack.

Why use one of these bags? Well, there’s really two reasons. When you’re doing carry-on only, there are two particular restrictions that are often in place: one is around the weight, and one is around the volume. When you use a wheeled roller bag, which you often see people carrying around airports, it devotes substantial weight and space to the wheel mechanism and the handle mechanism, and that is space that you can’t otherwise use for packing your stuff. Of course, the downside of using a duffel bag or a backpack is then you can’t roll it along the ground, and that has some physical implications. You need to be comfortable enough to carry one of these bags around for a period of time, especially if you’re standing in queues for a while at an airport. So, that trade-off may not be for everyone.

Another key part of the carry-on strategy is vacuum bags. You don’t necessarily have to use these unless you are very space-poor. Vacuum bags don’t really save you anything in terms of weight, but they do save you some space. So, this is the bag before I’ve wrapped it. The other cool thing about these travel bags is that you don’t need a vacuum cleaner. You can just roll them and compress the air out of them, massively reducing the amount of space you need in your bag.

This is the vacuum bag I’ve folded or rolled a bunch of shirts and some pants into. They have a little zip-lock mechanism at the entrance, just like a Ziploc bag. You can push the Ziploc shut a few times. Often, they have a little device that assists you with this, but you don’t need it. Then, you just roll the bag to roll the air out of it. You can also sit on it if you really want to get the last bit of air out. But once you’re done, you can see that the bag is substantially smaller. You can probably get rid of a significant percentage of the volume of the clothes. It doesn’t make the contents any lighter but does make it much more compact.

You also need a toiletries bag. This is one that is compliant or mostly compliant with various transport security regulations, so you can’t have anything over 100 milliliters in terms of volume in a liquid container. That’s the current rules. So, I’ll just empty this out onto the bed.

This is basically toiletries, some almost-toiletries, and miscellaneous items. I have some spare thread and needles for stitching anything up, safety pins which are great if you have buttons pop off, general hygiene stuff like a toothbrush, floss picks for me, and a safety razor. You’re allowed to take these onto the plane, but don’t take a traditional razor. Some moisturizing cream with SPF also serves as a sun cream, various cold and flu medications in case you get sick, maybe some sleeping tablets if they’re suitable for you (check with your doctor), deodorant, more tablets, a couple of bandages or Band-Aids, a comb, and also a small cologne dispenser. These are portable, and you can fill them up from a larger cologne dispenser, which also works for perfume. They’re very portable and handy.

One of the things you’ll be doing a lot of on most trips is pulling your passport in and out of your bag or your pocket. Modern passports have all sorts of sensitive stuff in them, and so if you bend, fold, or get them wet, you can damage them and they can stop scanning in automated systems. I carry this minimalist plastic sleeve. A lot of people at airports will give these away for free, or they come with your passport when you get them. They provide a rudimentary level of protection without taking up a lot of bulk, very useful for extending the lifetime of your passport, which may have to last five or ten years.

Long haul travel on airplanes, especially, can be exhausting. One of the best ways to reduce that exhaustion is by minimizing noise. A plane is a very noisy environment for many hours. If you can afford them, over-ear noise-canceling headphones are great. They cut down a lot of the engine noise and will help you also sleep better on the plane. Don’t forget to get some adapters so you can plug them in when there is an entertainment system on the plane. They’re relatively expensive, but if you can afford them, they’re a fantastic investment which will pay off many times over.

You’ll need to power your devices and recharge them on the trip, so you’ll need some of these power adapters for your phones and the equivalent for your laptop. If you’re traveling in a different country with different power plugs, you’ll need power plug adapters. You can typically get two types: one is the small, compact one which is only good for one country, and then you can get these universal types which adapt to any country but are much bulkier and don’t always fit in tight spaces. You may also consider a power bank to keep your devices charged on the go, especially when you don’t have access to a power point. Just be careful not to get one that’s too big and has too much capacity because you won’t be allowed on the plane.

Finally, one of the most important things, unless you’re locked entirely into one charging ecosystem, are these multi-headed cables. Now, it can be very challenging to find one that does data transfer and fast charging or high-speed charging on your particular phone ecosystem, but when you do, get a bunch of them. They’re extremely useful and can pull you out of many tight situations.

Although everything is mostly digital nowadays, you may still want to bring along some physical copies of reading material. Maybe you have to review something on the plane. For this, a very compact document wallet, preferably a plastic one, is very useful for keeping your stuff a little less damaged in all the rough and tumble of transport.

If you’re traveling for work and you’re doing carry-on only, and you’re traveling for more than say a week, then the strategy is probably going to work if you do some sort of laundry or get a laundry service at a hotel, which obviously costs some money and so it may not be for everyone. Very handy to bring a laundry bag to put your dirty clothes in, that way it’s very easy to do a wash whether you’re using the hotel service or going to a laundromat.

When you’re traveling with limited space, you don’t have the luxury of carrying a suit bag with you. If you’re carrying business shirts and a jacket, one of the ways you can minimize creasing in your business shirts is by folding them a certain way. There’s lots of videos on the internet; this is the particular way that I like to do it and I’ll show you that now.

So you pull the sleeve in, you need to start with a fully buttoned-up shirt. Pull in the other sleeve, your sleeves are sort of standing out at an almost 90-degree angle. Just sort of smooth out some of the most obvious creases, fold over the bottom, fold over the top, and fold over the bottom once more. And then your sleeves neatly pack in here. If your sleeves are too long, you may need to fold them over once more and then you tuck them in underneath; they’re sort of self-tucking which is really neat. And then you have the other sleeve, once again I should probably have the cuffs buttoned up, but you get the idea. And then you’ve folded it in here, just pull out some of the most obvious creases, and then you have a nice compact shirt fold that will fit into a smaller bag quite easily and it will reduce, not completely remove, reduce the amount of wrinkles you get in transit.

Same goes for jackets or blazers. You’ll see a number of different ways of folding this on the internet. The way I like to do it so far is you invert the jacket on one side slightly like this, and then you can fold the other side in behind it which gives you sort of some protection. And then if you need to, you can fold them up. I like this, didn’t do a particularly good job there, but then once again you have a relatively compact jacket, and you’re somewhat reducing the amount of wrinkles that you get.

Finally, everyone has their own clothes preferences. You’ll have your own list of clothes, and it’ll depend on the climate of the place you’re going to. You might need to bring a lot of warm clothes, but one particular clothing tip I would have is what we have here on the screen, which are called easy jeans, although there are lots of versions of these. These are essentially very comfortable sweatpants that look somewhat like jeans. This is something that you can walk around with, and you can probably go to a casual dinner in, but they’re extremely comfortable. You can sleep in them on long-haul flights; they’re essentially like wearing tracksuit pants. They’ll keep you warm, they don’t wrinkle too much, very practical, very comfortable, but they don’t look like you’re actually wearing sweatpants.

Depending on your particular fashion style or lack of fashion, you may not feel the need for this or you may feel the need to wear proper jeans. But for many people, an item like this will be great. You can even see that this one has drawstrings – you can’t see because they’re invisible – that can help you tighten them, so you don’t even need to wear a belt, which is useful for going in and out of airport security, for example.

Another useful item is one of these expandable fabric shopping bags. The idea here is that this is for carrying extra stuff. In the worst case, you can tie it using the handles to your bag as you go through an airport if you’ve got extra stuff that just won’t fit. The beauty of these things is they compress to a very small size, and so they take up almost no baggage. You can also get backpack versions of these, which are a little bit more bulky, but then you can carry it around if you need to go for a day trip.

Absolutely critical if you’re going anywhere with a dry climate: lip balm for your lips.

If you’ve ever had the experience of your phone changing time zones on you, or not changing time zones on you, and missing a flight because your alarm didn’t wake you at the right time, something else you might want to bring is a secondary alarm that isn’t your smartphone. So, I’ve used a stopwatch this trip. You can also buy custom wake-up alarms that are quite small and compact. It gives you a second point of redundancy to wake you up for those also critical deadlines.

In this day and age, pandemics and other sicknesses are around, so if you choose to wear masks on your trips, one of the things you may want to invest in, apart from a number of masks (because you need to turn them over relatively frequently), are these attachments you can get which will massively reduce the strain on your ears. For example, from these little cables cutting into your ears on long flights, these straps will put the strain on your head, which is a much better place to have it. You can also buy masks that actually do this directly; it depends on what you have available in your area.

Of course, you may want to bring some tests with you in case you get holed up in a hotel room and need to test yourself. Likewise, when you’re on the plane, you may want to consider bringing along some antiseptic wipes. These are very good for wiping down plane trays, handles, seat belts, and anything you’re going to touch a lot during the flight, depending on how socially awkward you feel wiping down surfaces in front of some of your fellow passengers. But you see lots of people doing it, and it’s another way you can somewhat reduce the chances that you’ll get sick from long plane flights in this day and age.

One of the things you want to do while you’re traveling is minimize the chances of getting sick. Things like hand sanitizer are very useful, and you can get these little attachments to attach them to your bag, or some of them actually come with their own version of it. They’re cheap, you can use them easily, and they’re very handy for keeping your hands clean.

Finally, there’s the shoes that you use. I prefer slip-on, slip-off boots – no shoelaces, and very quick to get on and off. You’ll be doing a lot of on and off, especially through airport security. And this is what the personal item and carry-on duffel bag look like fully packed.

So, I hope you found some of those tips useful. I haven’t gone through an exhaustive list of all of the stuff I bring with me on a carry-on or early baggage trip because a lot of it’s just the common items you would already have on your travel lists. What I’ve tried to do is highlight a few particular aspects of how I pack for carry-on only, and some particular items you may wish to add to your packing list to make your life easier when you’re traveling carry-on only. I hope this helps for your next trip.