Practical Travel Tips For Packing Luggage – 3 Different Ways To Pack Your Bags

It’s amazing how few practical travel tips for packing luggage can make life easier. Even more importantly than what to pack is how to pack your bags. Whatever packing method you use it’s all about making the most of the limited space available, to fill all space as efficiently as possible.

There are three key packing methods you can choose between.

Travel Tips For Packing Luggage – The Folding Packing Method

The most traditional and common way to pack your bags is by folding your clothes, similar like you do when you are putting your clothes in your wardrobe. This packing method will make your clothes crease if compressed for some time, but you can reduce creases notably by folding one item over another.

Take two or more items of clothes, like trousers, and lay half of one pair on top of the other. Fold the one on the bottom over the one on the top. Then take the other and fold it on the top. This gives each pair some support where you’ve folded it so it´s less likely to crease or wrinkle in the folds.

Travel Tips For Packing Luggage – The Rolling Packing Method

Clothes are less likely to crease if you roll them rather than fold them. They will also take less space this way. Most backpackers are very familiar with this packing method.

Rolling works well with most clothes. Lay each item of clothes face down, fold back the sleeves if applicable and then roll from the bottom up. You might even want to put a rubber band around them to make sure they stay rolled up.

Travel Tips For Packing Luggage – The Bundle Wrapping Packing Method

The best way to pack your bags is however to use the so called bundle wrapping packing method. As the name suggest bundle wrapping involves wrapping your clothes around a central core object, create a bundle and avoiding the folds that cause creases.

Maybe it sounds too good to be true but the bundle wrapping packing method works, you can even pack wrinkled clothes and they will come out less wrinkled. And you can pack your bags with more clothes using this method than with the other more conventional packing methods.

The bundle wrapping packing method is a little more complicated than the previous packing methods and can take a little practice to get perfect. It is though not as complicated as it may sound at first.

The 10 Steps For Bundle Wrapping

Gather together ALL the clothes you are taking with you before you start packing – adding anything afterwards can be difficult and it might mean you have to start all over again
Clothing is wrapped in a specific order so larger more wrinkle prone garments will end up on the outside of the bundle and the less easily wrinkled pieces closer to the core
Lay the first item flat in the suitcase without folding
When you have neatly arranged this item flat put the next item on top of it – put it in the opposite direction from the first item
Allow sleeves, pant legs, skirt lengths to hang over the edges as you stack more and more items
Make sure that collars and waistbands touch the suitcase edge as this enable more items to fit into the bundle
Select an object to form the core of the bundle – a bag with your underwear, socks, bathing suits and other small loose items would be a logical and ideal choice
Put your chosen core object on top of the pile of clothes you have stacked
Now you start wrapping up your bundle. Start with the last item you placed, neatly wrap the ends of that item across the core bag on top of the pile. Wrap sleeves, pant legs, skirts lengths over you core and work your way down to the bottom of your stack
Now place your remaining luggage items, like shoes, around the perimeter of the bundle you have made and your are done packing

What you will end up with is a bundle of all of your clothes that looks like a pillow. You can pick it up in one piece. It’s compactly packed so you can fit more items into your luggage and because it´s folded your clothes will wrinkle less.

When you arrive at your destination you work in reverse order to unpack your wardrobe. To find specific item in the bundle, lay it flat and unwrap until you reach the layer you want. Take the item out and refold the remainder.

Travel tips for packing luggage is aware that the bundle wrapping packing method sounds complicated at first but do give it a try… we are sure you will be pleasantly surprised when you unpack your clothes at your destination.

You will find photos explaining each packing method in detail at the Top Travel Tips website.