Beyond Baggage: How to Travel Without Bags Joseph Decibus August 25, 2017 Air Travel, general, Travel Tips 1 Comment Traveling without luggage can be adventurous to say the least. Being able to hop on last minute flights and take off without all of those things you usually have to bring – or think you have to bring – can be a way of traveling that you may only dream of – and then, only in your wildest dreams. Plus you can save money with basic economy tickets and stop worrying about whether you meet baggage restrictions. So though we’re probably just as reluctant to travel without bags as you are, we’ve put together several tips on how to do so. Escape the Baggage Mindset Travelers holding bags or bags holding travelers? / Photo by CheapOair staff Before you can get bags off your back, you may have to get them off your mind. For mentally we’ve so hard-wired baggage to travel that we often say “I’m packing my bags.” or “My bags are packed.” figuratively just to express our enthusiasm for going on a trip. And when we return, we say “I’m bagged” to let everyone know how pooped we are, as if our baggage got the best of us in the end. So the next time you reach for your suitcase upon booking a trip, do the unthinkable: Ask yourself “Do I really need this bag?” The question should just pop right out when you open a bag. (Incidentally, if out pops a mound of dirty clothes from your last trip – an unequivocal laundry lapse – the decision not to take that bag should be as simple as an open and shut case.) If “yes” is the answer though, then the follow-ups are “How can I make it as light as possible?” and “How can I make it the only one?” (For one bag tends to lead to another, and another, and….yes bags breed bags!) If you’re not asking these questions, it may be because, busy as you are, you’re not yet fully considering ways of eliminating, or at least reducing, bags. To take a tiny example, more and more hotels offer an array of personal hygiene amenities – even cosmetics – that can enable you to at least do without your toiletries bag. Use a Travel Wardrobe Valet Service With a service like DUFL, you pack once more and then never again. DUFL stores your wardrobe and then packs and ships a suitcase of clothes from it that you select for your trip with their proprietary smartphone app. Here’s how the service works once you sign up: Step 1. You pack a DUFL bag with a travel wardrobe that you can use for all kinds of trips from island vacations to tramping around Europe to business missions, and then have DUFL pick it up. Step 2. DUFL photographs your travel wardrobe, inventories it, and stores it for you in a bricks and mortar place and in an online virtual closet. Step 3. When you’re ready to travel, schedule your trip with DUFL on their app, and then use the app to select the clothes that you want for your trip from your virtual closet. Step 4. DUFL packs the clothes that you’ve requested into a DUFL suitcase, and ships it to you at your destination. Step 5. At the end of your trip, pile your dirty clothes into the DUFL and arrange for a pickup. DUFL retrieves your bag, cleans all of your clothing, and then puts it back into your travel wardrobe until you need it again. DUFL has a monthly subscription fee plus a flat fee for each round-trip baggage shipment. You also have to sign a contract with them. So this is a service that’s probably better for frequent travelers. Furthermore, since you’re relying on someone else to pack and deliver your bag, you might want to have a Plan B in the rare event something doesn’t quite go as expected. Find the perfect last minute flights for you to take off on an adventure! Wear Multi-Functional Clothes Multi-functional dress wear lets you fly light and change your look on the fly. For women it’s often a single, reconfigurable outfit, but for men it usually means mixing and matching a few pieces of clothing some of which have multiple functions. A kind of origami of travel wear, it lets you change your look from casual to more formal with a pull here, a push there, a snap, a flip, a reverse, a fold, and so on. It’s versatile clothing that can replace a bunch of separate outfits that you might spend hours picking and packing, burn a ton of energy lugging around in suitcases, and that you may never end up wearing anyway. Some multi-functional clothing comes with its own travel tote and some you have to pack, which you can easily do into a personal item. Click on the video below, which we found posted on YouTube by Neli štrukelj, to see just one example of multi-functional dress wear. There are other examples of multi-functional clothing for women travelers as well. The Kameleon dress, for instance, lets you change your look as quickly as a chameleon changes color to suit its environs. Or you could try the Unique Travel Set, which has a Kickstarter campaign going on, and was recently featured on the BBC Travel Show. For men, multi-functional clothing usually involves a few items of clothing that are convertible or reversible and that can straddle a style line between, say, beach casual and dressy for dinner. For example, you can buy a stylish t-shirt and pair it with convertible pants. So if you want to go to the beach, you just zip the legs off the pants, converting them to shorts, and put them on with the t-shirt; and, if you want to dine out later on, all you do is zip the pants legs back on. See “Looking Sharp – Dave’s Travel Clothes for the Guys.” Purchase What You Need As You Travel Just wear what the mannequins wear. Hey, it’s Paris. The Hugo Boss store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. / Photo by Panoramas via Flickr. Creative Commons License 2.0 Make your trip a moveable feast by buying what you need as you travel. If you’re inclined to dismiss this idea as one that costs extra and takes up scarce time, tours that combine shopping with sightseeing might make you reconsider. If you’re off to Paris on some last minute flights, for instance, you can book a private walking shopping tour in which a local guide whisks you to boutiques and department stores in a popular sightseeing area like Le Marais where you can learn about the historic neighborhood while adding some distinctly French style to your wardrobe. Since your clothing size and preferences are provided to the stores you’ll be visiting ahead of time, they’ll have selections ready and waiting for you. “Fabulous You Paris” is just one company that offers such services, charging from 100 euros and up for a two-hour tour, depending on the type you arrange. Whether you’re a fashionista or not, this can be a great way to build a stylish international wardrobe that you might otherwise never have a chance to assemble even using the internet. Indeed, you might arrange your armoire into sections of clothes based on each city in which you bought them and each one where you plan to travel to for more. (e.g., your Hong Kong nights section – (wink) – might hold silk dresses.) Your armoire can become a sort of travelogue reminding you of good trips gone by and inspiring you to take even grander ones. If you have to justify any extra expense of this strategy, you can always think of it as killing two birds with one stone: Sightseeing and filling gaps in your wardrobe. Or, if you’re visiting a place where the currency conversion rate is in your favor, then it’s a well-deserved shopping spree at a discount. Furthermore, clothing in foreign countries can cost less, despite value-added taxes, be more stylish, and be of equal or greater quality than clothing purchased in the U.S. She shops, she sightsees, she triumphs over travel luggage. Visiting the Arc de Triomphe on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. / Photo by Izabela Magier for Shutterstock. If you prefer a more serendipitous and cheaper experience though, then make your own hit list of stores, especially second-hand ones like the Salvation Army, and flea markets at your destination and start your shopping as soon as your plane lands. Shipping home what you buy involves still extra expense and paperwork too. (You could consider donating what you buy to a local branch of a national or international charity at the end of your trip, but unless you give to an IRS-approved one, your donation probably will not be tax deductible.) Furthermore, if you buy clothing abroad, you may have to do clothing size conversions, and may run into the problem of size inequivalence as well. (e.g., large size suit jackets in Tokyo will typically be smaller than their large size counterparts in New York.) 3D Print Clothing at Your Destination The 3D Print – Knit machine stands ready to print you a blazer at Ministry of Supply. / Photo courtesy of Ministry of Supply. For years many travelers have enjoyed visiting Hong Kong and London in part to have their clothing made by some of the best tailors in the world. But we may soon look forward to going to these cities and others for a fashion forward vacation in which we wear bespoke clothing that was freshly 3D printed. The idea that you can send your physical dimensions and clothing tastes electronically to a professional 3D clothing maker in a city where you’ll be vacationing and have a complete wardrobe for your trip printed and delivered to your hotel room is becoming less far fetched due to advances in 3D printed clothing and the sheer persistence of this idea. In the meantime, you can at least purchase svelte blazers for your trip that are 3D printed by Ministry of Supply, a highly innovative clothing firm with stores in several U.S. cities. Just ninety minutes is all it takes the company to print one. And the blazers have performance features like body-mapped ventilation and articulation for enhanced breathability and fluidity of movement; moisture wicking to keep you dry; and, wrinkle resistance for neatness. Best of all, they apparently fit so well that putting one on is said to be like getting a warm hug! So if you’re visiting a city like Boston, you can put in an order with Ministry of Supply to print some blazers for you there, relieving you of having to bring this part of your wardrobe. Or Ministry of Supply can ship them to you if you’re traveling elsewhere. (Despite the quickness of the printing process, it does take about 3-5 days for the company to fulfill an order.) Some advocates of 3D printed travel clothing like Janne Kyttanen, a digital sculptor, go even further, envisioning a world without baggage in which travelers download a file of code that contains everything they need for their trip that they then print out at their hotel or the airport in which they land. Ideally, 3D printed travel clothing will enhance our trips not only because it frees us of luggage, but because it will make us look good and have qualities that complement our skin and activities. One can imagine, for instance, island vacationers being able to routinely 3D print bathing suits for themselves at their beach hotels that are stylish; have the fit and feel of skin; and, that offer other desirable qualities such as shark repellent designs, sunlight filtering for a full body tan without lotion, and micro massaging points to prevent swimmers’ cramp. The 3D printing of travel clothing and accessories surely promises to give even The Man in The White Suit a run for his money. Wash, Rinse, Dry. Repeat! Traveling with just the clothes on your back and putting yourself through the laundry is not recommended. / Photo by Jesse Hull via Flickr. Creative Commons License 2.0 If nothing in this grab bag of ideas has grabbed you so far, then you could always pack a couple of sets of clothing into a personal item and just use the laundry services of your hotel to enable you to wear them on a rotational basis for your entire trip. But if you tire of doing so, then supplement your ultra-minimalist travel wardrobe by renting a suit or two. Final Thoughts Easy Going / Photo by Hartwig HKD via Flickr Creative Commons License 2.0 Whether you’re able to pirouette about the globe with a sleek carry-on, or you plod about it like a pack animal, it’s good to know that when you want to cast off the yoke of luggage entirely you’ve got some interesting options. And as incentives for flying without bags increase at the same time that disincentives for taking them pile up, more and more travelers will want to take the plane and leave the luggage. Also, the number, quality, and cost effectiveness of services that are willing to help them do so will increase as well. While we’ve focused here mostly on ways of reducing clothing that you bring on your trip, some of the same ideas can be used to travel free of stuff like golf clubs, laptop computers, and other things that we often lug around the world. For example, a service like Luggage Free will ship pretty much anything you want for your trip, including bikes, golf clubs, and skis. This service will even ship your luggage to your state room when you’re taking a cruise. FAQs: Q: Is it possible to travel without luggage on international flights? A: Yes, it is possible to travel without luggage on international flights. However, it is important to check the specific regulations of the airline you are flying with, as they may have different requirements for international travel. Q: Can I bring a personal item along with my carry-on bag? A: Most airlines allow passengers to bring a personal item, such as a purse or laptop bag, in addition to their carry-on bag. However, size restrictions may apply, so be sure to check with your airline. Q: Are there any items that cannot be carried in a carry-on bag? A: Yes, there are certain items that are not permitted in carry-on bags due to safety regulations. These include sharp objects, liquids over a certain volume, and flammable materials. Familiarize yourself with the prohibited items list provided by your airline to ensure compliance. Q: What should I do if my carry-on gets lost during the flight? A: If your luggage gets lost during the flight, promptly report the incident to the airline’s baggage service desk. They will guide you through the process of filing a lost luggage claim and provide you with further instructions. Q: Can I purchase travel insurance to cover a lost carry-on? A: Yes, many travel insurance policies offer coverage for lost or delayed luggage. Read the terms and conditions of the policy carefully to understand the extent of coverage and any applicable deductibles. Q: Is it necessary to lock my luggage when traveling with just a carry-on? A: While it is not a requirement, it is always a good idea to lock your luggage for added security. Choose TSA-approved locks to allow airport security personnel to inspect your bag if necessary, without causing damage. Ready to travel without bags? Or maybe you’ve done it before? Tell us all about it in the comments. [Feature photo: Spiral Baggage Claim / Photo by Masakazu Matsumoto via Flickr Creative Commons License 2.0].
