I once watched a guy haul a 23kg suitcase up three flights of stairs in Lisbon. I walked past him with a 28-litre backpack and a grin. Not a humblebrag — a strategy. Since 2015 I’ve crossed 67 borders, and for the last four years I’ve done almost all of it with a single daypack. No checked bag. No wheelie. Just one bag that fits under the seat in front of me. It changes how you move, how you spend, and honestly how you think about stuff. Ever paid €40 at a Ryanair gate for an oversized bag? Then this post is for you.
Bucharest, 2019. I was sprinting for a midnight bus to Sofia and my daypack strap snapped about 400 metres from the station. Six weeks on a cheap 20-litre with a dodgy seam had finally caught up with me. I sat on the curb, tied the strap back together with a shoelace, and made the bus with maybe ninety seconds to spare. That shoelace held for another three countries. The lesson wasn’t “buy better gear” — though yes, eventually I did. It was that everything I owned fit in a bag I could repair with a shoelace. When your whole life on the road weighs six kilos, a broken strap is an inconvenience, not a crisis.
Why This Matters
Budget travel is mostly a game of eliminating costs you didn’t notice. Checked bags are one of the sneakiest. Low-cost carriers have quietly turned luggage into a profit centre — a return checked bag on a European budget airline can easily cost €80–120, which on a five-day trip is often more than your accommodation. Go carry-on only and that money stays in your pocket. Or better, it becomes three extra nights somewhere cheap.
Mobility is the real payoff. With one small bag you can walk out of a station and straight onto a tram without wrestling anything. You can take the 6am flight because there’s no bag drop queue. You can change plans mid-trip without re-packing a suitcase in a hostel corridor at 5am. Freedom has a price, and usually it’s about €60 per flight.
Here’s my counter-intuitive opinion: the “pack for every scenario” advice is backwards. Packing light isn’t about deprivation — it’s about trusting that the world sells socks. Every item you leave behind is a decision you don’t have to make again on the road. Fewer choices, more energy for the actual trip.
Top 5 Tips
1. Choose the bag before anything else — and buy it used. A 25–30 litre pack with a clamshell or wide top opening beats a top-loader every time, because you can see everything at once. I paid £18 for a used 28-litre pack on a secondhand site in 2021 and it’s still going. Check internal dimensions against your airline’s personal-item allowance (often 40×30×20cm on European budget carriers) and measure it yourself with a tape. Don’t trust the product listing.
2. Pack for four days, wash for the rest. Four days of clothes is the sweet spot: enough to never do laundry in a panic, few enough to fit in a bag the size of a shoebox. I carry three t-shirts, one long-sleeve, one pair of trousers (worn), one pair of shorts, five pairs of socks and underwear, one light fleece. A sink wash with a laundry sheet takes ten minutes and dries overnight on a hostel radiator. If a trip runs longer than a week, I do one proper laundrette wash — usually €4–6.
3. Wear your bulkiest layer on travel days. Oldest trick in the book, and people still don’t do it. Jacket on your body, boots on your feet, heaviest trousers on your legs. It saves maybe three litres of pack space and keeps you warm on freezing buses. Yes, you look slightly ridiculous in Malaga in July. Nobody cares.
4. Go solid, not liquid, wherever you can. Solid shampoo bars, a shaving bar, a deodorant stick, toothpaste tablets. Liquids are heavy, leak, and trigger the security bag search. My entire wash kit weighs under 200g and fits in a sandwich bag. Buy bars from a local zero-waste shop at home — mine cost about £12 for four months’ supply.
5. Build a “one in, one out” rule and stick to it. Buy a souvenir t-shirt? Something else leaves the bag, either donated or posted home. I post a small parcel home maybe once every two months — usually £8–15 — and it’s cheaper than a checked bag and far less annoying. The rule stops the slow creep that turns a daypack into a suitcase by week three.
Budget Breakdown
Real numbers from my last six-week trip through the Balkans and Italy, prices in pounds sterling. Your costs will differ, but the shape of this budget is the point.
- Used 28-litre daypack: £18 one-off (new equivalents run £45–90 — buy used first).
- Packing cubes (two, compression): £14 one-off. Genuinely the best £14 I’ve spent; they compress clothes by about a third.
- Solid toiletries kit: £12 for roughly four months of use.
- Laundry: £4–6 per laundrette wash, roughly every 10 days; sink washes are free with £3 of laundry sheets for the whole trip.
- Luggage fees avoided: estimated £95 across six flights — that’s the money this whole approach saved me.
- Replacement strap and a repair kit (needle, thread, duct tape): £9, and it saved a £60 bag replacement.
Total one-off gear cost: about £53. Total saved on this one trip: roughly £95 in bag fees alone, before counting the times I skipped a taxi because I could just walk with my pack. The maths isn’t close.
One Mistake to Avoid
In 2017 I tried to do a ten-day trip through Norway in winter with a 22-litre bag. Stupid. I had no room for a proper insulated layer, so I wore the same damp fleece for a week and spent £40 on a replacement jacket in Bergen that I then had to carry anyway. The trip was cold and miserable and I learned the hard way that ultralight has a floor.
The mistake wasn’t the bag size — it was refusing to adapt the plan to the climate. A daypack works brilliantly for warm and temperate trips. For genuine cold, or for trips with formal events, or for anything involving specialist gear, you either accept a slightly bigger carry-on or you accept that you’ll buy things on arrival. Know which trips a daypack suits. Don’t force it because a blog post told you to. That blog post was me, and I was wrong about Norway.
Also — and this one stings — check your airline’s personal-item size before you book, not the night before. I once flew a carrier whose “personal item” was 35×20×20cm. My bag didn’t fit. I paid £50 at the gate for a bag I was carrying on my back. Read the fine print. Every time.
You don’t need much to go far. I’ve slept in sixteen-bed dorms and eaten supermarket bread for dinner more times than I’ll admit, and the trips I remember best are the ones where I could move fast, change my mind, and keep my money for the things that actually mattered — a ferry to an island, a proper meal, a ticket to something strange and local. Start with what you already own. Take a short trip with a small bag and see how little you miss. Then book the longer one. The world is very good at selling you things you don’t need, and a daypack is the cheapest way I know to stop listening.