Skyroll Garment Bag Review

We've long advocated rolling your clothing to reduce wrinkles. The Skyroll garment bag introduces a simple way to lay your shirts, pants, and suits on a garment bag and roll the whole batch up at once around a tubular central core. Does it work? Are there drawbacks? Read on.

The first thing you do to use the Skyroll is to take it apart. There are two sections, the garment bag and the central core, which is a light but rigid tubular core that has a circular partition in the center to form two separate compartments when ends are opened for access.

The Core allows access from either end through zippered openings. You can keep toiletries, shoes, underwear, or any rigid objects less than a foot long in each side.

The garment bag section looks just like any garment bag. You simply zip it open, then lay your clothing down (carefully, because haphazard arrangement can mean wrinkles later) one piece on top of another. On our last trip we had 6 shirts and one pair of pants layered this way, and two t-shirts and several pairs of underwear and socks in the garment bag's mesh pockets).

Then you follow directions, attaching the garment section to the tubular one, rolling it up until you have a bag that looks like a duffel (shown in the picture above).

We not only took the Skyroll on two trips, we actually washed our clothes, re-packed them, and left them rolled in the Skyroll for a week between trips. Wrinklage was minimal.

Access to our stuff was easy. The Skyroll would have been big enough for my main bag to Europe, easily carrying more than a week's worth of clothes. (I like to pack about 10 days worth, then plan to stay in vacation homes every other week so I have access to washing machines.)

But Skyroll's main strengths may lie in it's intended audience: the business traveler. This is what you want if you travel the US frequently carrying a suit or two. It will easily fit in an overhead bin, it's surprisingly comfortable to carry, and it's light.

I've mentioned above that the Skyroll is ideal as a carry-on in the US. That's because the US carriers frequently allow larger carry-ons than even their own rules specify. Don't count on the Skyroll being carry-on size for your European vacation until you've checked the carriers you intend to use, especially if they're budget carriers. The Skyroll is 24" long. Its width will vary with the amount of clothing you roll in it.

A predicted problem with using the Skyroll for European vacation travel comes if you've planned one of those "Ten cities in 2 weeks" sort of vacations, where you're packing and unpacking every day. Eventually you'll have to put some of your dirty clothing alongside the clean. Segregation of dirty and clean just seems easier in a conventional rectangle box of a suitcase.

That said, Skyroll does what it claims to do for its intended audience. It's very easy to carry and maneuver; they've provided handles everywhere. But our picture over there shows a bonus that only a veteran European traveler might recognize. You're sitting waiting for your train. You've bought a meal. You've even managed to find a seat on a bench(!). You try to eat but there's no where to set your drink.

Yes, and the Skyroll is quite stable, too.