2. What is lightweight luggage?
If you've been searching for lightweight luggage then you'll
no doubt have found a baffling array of terms to describe
just how light these cases are, marketers will use a variety
of different titles to attract your attention. These range
from superlight, hyper-light, feather-light, tech-light, mega-
light and the list goes on. But what do they mean? And
how do you know which is best? In short, nothing and you
don't.
3. You see, marketers make up these to sell these products as
being increasingly lightweight luggage items, but in reality
the names have little relation to their actual weight.
As a rough guide, a truly lightweight case soft case should
be below 3.5 kg (large case) to be deemed lightweight
and under 4kg for a hard case.
4. Why pick lightweight?
In times of ever increasing charges and decreasing weight
limits, lightweight luggage reigns supreme. Not only will
you save money, you'll have case that's much more
portable and with modern cases, you won't really have to
sacrifice durability either.
5. Materials - what to look for
Advances in technology mean that cases are constantly
getting lighter, stronger and better looking! A wide variety
of materials are used from polycarbonate to exotic patent
materials no one's ever heard of. So look out for
polycarbonate, hybrid ABS and patented technology.
Beware of extremely lightweight no brand cases, these may
look good, but they'll be made of the something equivalent
in strength to paper and will probably only have a wafer
thin frame holding it together - think of it as a kite with
wheels.