Now that you’ve caught the travel bug, and finally figured out how to find the best deals on flights, packing for your trip is the only thing standing between you your perfect getaway. There is nothing worse than budgeting out your trip and being hit with baggage fees on your way to your destination and back home.
If you want to keep your costs low so you can spend your coins on things you actually want to do, take advice from Erykah Badu, “pack light!” You can pack a lot more than you think into a carry-on. Keep reading to find out just how to always carry your luggage on your flights, no matter how long your getaway.
1. Find Some Packing Cubes:
If you haven’t heard of packing cubes, yet, once you use them, you won’t be able to travel without them. Our suitcases fill up fast because of empty space between our clothes, shoes, and toiletries. But with packing cubes, you essentially stuff as many items of clothing in a small cube, eliminating wasted space.
Besides saving you space in your luggage, packing cubes alsohelp you better organize your luggage. You can find them anywhere in the luggage section. Start with three and add more if you need!
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2. Wear Your Bulky Clothes And Items On The Plane:
Regardless of the season at home, if you need to pack a coat, boots, or some other piece of heavy clothing that will take up half the space in your suitcase, your best bet is to wear it on your flight.
Now, of course, you don’t have to keep it on for the entire flight, but you should keep it on to make it past the check-in counter, and the gate, which is the two places your bags get checked for size requirements. If you get hot, you can always tie it to your suitcase and keep it rolling.
3. Get Hooked Up:
We’ve all seen that person in the airport, walking onto the plane with their entire life strapped to their backs. If you pay close attention to those ginormous packs, you notice that these travelers have bottles and shoes, and random items hooked on the outside.
Outside of packing cubes, these special hooks, called carabiners, will save your travel life. You'll still have to be able to fit your carry-on in the overhead bin, but hooking up some random items to the outside of your bag can be another way to fit more inside your bag without getting pinned with more fees.
4. Get To Know The Baggage Rules:
Before you head to the airport, take a look at your itinerary to see which airline or airlines you’ll be flying. Typically, if you’re leaving the country your airline will offer at least one free checked bag and will have free carry-on options. If you’re taking short domestic, or budget flights, this may not be the case.
Get familiar with carry-on sizes and choose a bag that is small enough to meet all the airlines’ restrictions. It will save you a lot of frustration and most importantly, money, on your next trip.
5. Get Creative With Your Packing:
We all want to look our best on vacations, especially whenwe’re stunting for the ‘gram. Still, you can get creative when you’re packing your suitcase to make room for plenty of Instagram worthy outfits. When you’re picking your outfits for a trip, choose bottoms like jeans and shorts that you can wear more than once, and a pair of shoes that can pass as dressy at night and casual during the day.
If you have a long trip ahead, bring a travel laundry detergent in case your air bnb has a washing machine, or even if you have to hand wash a few items in the hotel room. Repeating one or two outfits on a 10-day trip is much better than wasting one or two hundred dollars in luggage fees.
Sharita Jennings is a fitness and travel enthusiast and creator of Get Fit Like That, LLC. She is a health policy attorney and ACE certified group fitness instructor and fitness nutrition specialist. She provides online fitness plans and leads group fitness classes in Washington DC. Check out her fitness tips and workouts at GetFitLikeThat.com.
