Travelling light

Travelling light can offer such a relief to those who are used to carrying heavy luggage around that some ‘experts’ have even set up their own helpful websites in its honour. Approval rolls in to their letters pages from readers who have travelled light on bush treks, made regular business trips much easier to bear and removed the boredom of long, drawn out check-in queues.

According to www.onebag.com: ‘There’s no question: over-packing tops the list of biggest travel mistakes.’ Subsequently its pages are packed (light, of course) with lots of well-ordered and easy-to-navigate tips, links and advice to help you travel ‘pretty much anywhere, for an indefinite length of time, with nothing more than a single (carry-on-sized) bag.’

Similarly www.travelite.org is an ‘educational site that teaches ordinary people to travel light’. Presumably this includes anyone who isn’t used to travelling light, or hasn’t thought about it until excess or bulky baggage has added to the stress of his or her holiday or business trip.

Both sites cover everything from what kind of bag to take, to which clothes to pack and how to work the contents of your bag around cabin and airport security restrictions. So what can we learn from them?

Carry-on flying

A ‘carry-on-sized’ bag is one that doesn’t need to be checked in. If you’ve been to an airport lately – particularly very busy ones such as Gatwick or Heathrow – you may have encountered long check in queues. Add these to waiting points at security, passport control and departure lounges and the tedium can get your holiday off to a stressful start. Thanks to e-ticketing you can now enjoy the smug pleasure of sweeping past check-in and directly into the departure lounge, as long as you have a carry-on-sized bag. You need to check your airline at time of travel for what size this should be, but generally speaking it needs to be able to fit easily into an overhead cabin locker.

Guidelines are changing all the time so make sure to keep on top of maximum sizes and weights. The ‘one piece of hand luggage only’ rule imposed in summer 2006 for security reasons was lifted in most UK airports in January 2008 but this has had a knock-on effect on regular hand luggage rules. If you’re aiming to travel light, it’s not worth getting to the plane and being told you have to go back and repack or check bags in!

The bag – style matters

The type of bag you take matters too. The expert at One Bag suggests that a soft-sided bag is best, with external compression straps that can be cinched down to minimal size when packed. A small wheelie suitcase can make sense for many people, especially those who want to be ‘smarter’ for business trips or need to cater for a bad back. Both One Bag and Travelite do point out that extra wheels and handles can be cumbersome however, you may be more likely to have luggage checked and they are not ideal for destinations with cobblestones, steep hills, steps or those well off the beaten track. Their practical solution is what’s commonly known as a ‘travel pack’: a rucksack that doubles up as a holdall. This way you can wear the bag on your back for optimum weight distribution and pack shoulder straps away when you need to. Some even have wheels too! Check out outdoor expert shops such as www.blacks.co.uk or www.millets.co.uk for ideas.

What to take

Putting restrictions on the size of your bag and the weight of its contents is good news. It means you can’t afford to cram items in that you don’t need. At this point you need to think practically: a hair dryer in the jungle isn’t much good, neither are flip-flops in the Arctic. Making a packing list is the best option – although you may need different lists for different itineraries such as trekking or business trips. Some space-saving ideas include combined chargers for phones and cameras, washing clothes as you go, and cutting down on toiletries that you could buy there. Remember you can only take 100ml of any liquid in a plastic bag as hand luggage anyway.

How to pack

One of the top tips here is to ‘bundle pack’. This means taking a central item such as an ‘organiser roll’ of toiletries and wrapping each layer of clothing around it separately. This can help to eliminate creasing and although some items might be less easy to access, learning to bundle wrap and unwrap quickly can become a satisfying art. Socks and other underwear should also be kept together, with a separate bag for dirty laundry. You can also layer up bulky items on your body at the airport so that jumpers, sweatshirts, jackets or walking boots don’t count as part of your hand luggage allowance.

Travelling light can leave you to get on with more exciting aspects of your holiday but that doesn’t mean you should downsize on travel insurance. Make sure you have adequate cover with single trip, annual or Discoverer travel insurance from Direct Line.

Related information:

Shopping spots – tips for the global shopper

Last minute travel – hassle-free ways to book a last minute travel deal

Family holiday guide – ideal locations and what to do before you go