The Carry-On Luggage I Actually Recommend (and Who Should Skip My Top Pick)
Carry on luggage worth buying, named by a well-traveled curator: our top pick, who should skip it, and where to check airline fit.
Curator
Founder & Editor
Elodie Marchetti spent roughly a decade as a buyer for airport travel-retail shops, deciding which adapters, neck pillows, luggage lines, locks, cubes, and cables earned shelf space. She saw the sell-through data on all of it: which pieces got returned, which got quietly discontinued, and which sold every single day because they simply worked.
She grew up moving between port cities, so her childhood was a long sequence of packing and unpacking, and she got very good at it. After a decade on the supply side she burned out, spent a year traveling with one carry-on, and realized she had become the friend everyone texted before a trip. Intastravel is that group chat, written down and made searchable. She lives in Lisbon now.
She writes the recommendation first, the one blunt sentence that names the pick, and builds the rest of the piece backward from it. If she cannot say the pick in one sentence, she decides she does not understand the product well enough yet, and she goes and uses it more.
Carry on luggage worth buying, named by a well-traveled curator: our top pick, who should skip it, and where to check airline fit.
A carry-on packing list of nine things worth bringing, from two packing cubes to a side-support neck pillow, with honest notes on what to skip.