I’m Robert Lora, and Travel Bag Experts is mine. I decide what gets covered, I write the guides, and my name is on all of them.
Why this site exists
I’m American, I live in Spain, and I spend a good part of every year moving between the two. That adds up to a lot of transatlantic flights, a lot of packing at midnight, and a lot of time at a gate wondering whether the bag on my shoulder was the right call.
Bags are the piece of travel gear I think about most, because getting one wrong costs you the trip in small increments. The strap that starts digging in by hour three. The carry on that measures fine on paper and not at the gate. The zip that gives up somewhere between a train station and a taxi rank. None of it ruins a trip on its own, and all of it wears you down.
Travel Bag Experts is where I put what I work out. It’s a small site run by one person, and I’d rather it be useful than large.
How I evaluate the bags on this site
This is the part most affiliate sites stay vague about, so here it is plainly. I don’t have every bag in this catalog in my hands. There’s no warehouse behind this site and no testing lab. What I do is research, and I try to do it more carefully than the next person.
For every bag I write about:
- I pull the manufacturer’s published specifications and record them: weight, exterior and interior dimensions, capacity in liters, materials, warranty terms.
- I compare those numbers across the whole category instead of repeating the brand’s framing. A bag isn’t light because its maker says so. It’s light relative to the bags sitting next to it.
- I read owner reviews in volume, hundreds per product where they exist, and I look for the complaint that repeats. One broken wheel is bad luck. Forty people describing the same broken wheel is a design decision.
- I check that the bag is still sold, still priced roughly where I say it is, and still the version I described. Product lines get revised quietly and specs drift.
What I don’t do is claim to have carried a bag I haven’t carried. Where a page says I used something, I used it, and the page says what for and for how long. Everywhere else, read what you find here as specification comparison and owner research rather than a field test. Those are different things, and blurring them is how this whole genre lost people’s trust.
If you catch something wrong, a stale price, a spec that doesn’t match, a bag that no longer exists, tell me and I’ll fix it.
How the site makes money
Travel Bag Experts earns a commission through the Amazon Associates program. If you buy through a link here, Amazon pays me a small percentage and you pay exactly the price you would have paid anyway.
That’s what keeps the site running, and it isn’t what decides the order of the picks. Commission rates across luggage brands sit close enough together that there’s no version of this where a payout is worth recommending the wrong bag. Full terms are in the affiliate disclosure.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or a bag you think deserves a look: [email protected], or through the contact page. I read everything that comes in.