If You Bought Packing Cubes to Save Space, You Bought Them for the Wrong Reason

Thirty or forty dollars is what a set of packing cubes costs, and almost everybody who buys one buys it for a reason that turns out to be wrong. Packing cubes do not save space. They never have. This is a plain-spoken guide to what packing cubes actually do, made for seniors and older travelers who would rather know before the next trip than after it. -------------- How to travel more and visit your dream destinations without breaking the bank: https://travelmorepayless.com --------------- We start with the reason a cube is worth having at all, which has nothing to do with fitting more in. Suitcases come open in handling, and when yours does, the cubes are the only reason nothing of yours ends up on an airport floor. From there we get into the compression cube that squeezes its own edges and leaves the middle a lump, the one small cube that should never leave your hand when the gate agent takes your carry-on, and the checked bag weight limit that costs a hundred dollars each way on several major American airlines. Compression removes air, and air weighs nothing, which is the whole problem with the space pitch. There are twenty-one points in all, and a fair few of them cut against the usual packing cube advice. The second scale that only exists at international gates and catches Americans out. The hard-packed bag that fails a sizer a soft one would have squeezed through. The freezer bag method that works beautifully and requires kneeling on a hotel floor, which is worth knowing before anybody recommends it to you. Plus what goes in the hotel drawer, what never belongs in a cube at all, and the one kind of trip where I leave the whole set at home. The point of all this is to travel smart and comfortable at any age, without overpaying for fabric or hauling more weight than you need to. Tell me which of those trips you are packing for next, and whether the cubes are coming.