Methodology
How we research and rank luggage
This is our headline promise: a method you can check. Everyone in this category says they tested twenty suitcases. We have not lab-tested any of them, and we say so — here is exactly what we do instead.
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Bags we claim to have lab-tested
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Sponsored placements accepted
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Free products accepted for coverage
Those zeros are the point, not a gap. We would rather publish that we have not tested a bag than pretend we have. What we bring instead is a consistent, reproducible method applied the same way to every product — one you could run yourself from the same public specs.
1. How we source the picks
We start from what people actually search for and what Amazon actually stocks — because a recommendation you cannot buy is useless. We build a longlist for each category (the well-known bags, the value options, the cult favorites), confirm each is currently sold, and cut it down. Nothing gets a spot because a brand asked; brands cannot buy a spot, because we accept no sponsored placements and no free products for coverage.
2. The scoring rubric
Every bag is scored out of 10 against a small set of criteria chosen for its category. For a carry-on those are usually build quality, empty weight, packing capacity, wheels, and value; for a set, build, per-piece value, weight, wheels, and warranty. The overall score is the mean of those metric scores, shown to one decimal place. We publish the sub-scores on every card so you can see exactly what the number is made of.
The score is a judgment from documented research — published manufacturer specs, dimensions checked against airline sizers, cost-per-trip arithmetic, and aggregated owner reviews. It is not a measurement we took in a lab, because we do not have one. This is also why you will never see an aggregate star ratingfrom us in a page's structured data: we have no customer reviews to aggregate, and inventing one would be a lie.
3. The numbers we actually run
The arithmetic is the part credentialed competitors skip, so it is the part we lead with. For each bag we look at empty weight (what the bag costs you before you pack, which matters on weight-limited airlines), weight-to-capacity (how much you can carry per pound of bag), does-it-fit-the-bin (outer dimensions, wheels included, against the airline sizers), and cost-per-trip (list price divided by a realistic number of trips), so a cheap bag that survives ten trips and an expensive one that survives forty land on a level field.
4. How prices work
Every price on this site is pulled live from the Amazon Product API and stamped with the date it was fetched. If our data is more than 48 hours old, the number disappears and the button falls back to "Check price on Amazon" — we would rather show you no number than a stale one. We never type a price into a page by hand. Amazon's price at checkout is always the one that counts.
5. The "don't buy this if" rule
Every bag we recommend carries a line telling you who it is notfor, and every roundup names at least one pick to skip. It is the fastest way we know to prove we are on your side rather than the retailer's — and no competitor page we studied does it.
6. Updates and corrections
We review our flagship roundups at least quarterly and re-check the airline-size guides against carrier policy pages on the same cadence, because those rules change. Every page shows a visible last-updated date. If we get something wrong and you tell us, we correct material errors within 48 hours and note the correction on the page. See our editorial policy for the full standards, and contact us to flag anything.