Away Featherlight Backpack Review

Even if you pack for your vacation in rolling carry on luggage, you’ll still want something to carry your book, snacks, and water bottle for the plane. That’s where an excellent personal item bag comes into play. If you play your cards right and choose the perfect one, it will transition easily from carrying your flight essentials to being your everyday bag on a trip.

How do you find that perfect bag? Well, it depends on what you prioritize. If you’re looking for something to hold the essentials without weighing you down, you may look at something like the Away Featherlight Backpack. It has organization to get you on board your flight with some helpful features you may appreciate in the airport and your destination. We tested it on a weeklong trip to Jamaica, taking it on four different flights and carrying it to the beach and around the resort for eight days. Would we pack it up again? Let’s find out.

External Components

When a brand puts “featherlight” in the bag’s name, you hope it lives up to the hype. At 1 pound (0.5 kg), the Away Featherlight Backpack is definitely on the lighter end of the spectrum, though it’s not as light as a designated packable bag. However, those extra few ounces add padding to the bottom and back panel of the bag, so we don’t mind.

The polyester twill material is super soft. We have the Arctic Blue colorway, which is very light, yet we’re surprised by how well it’s holding up after a week at a Caribbean resort and beach. We’d expect it to have picked up more than just the few marks that it did, and the Salt White colorway may show more. You can also get it in a few darker colorways if you want something that may hide dirt more. Luckily, the fabric is easy to wipe clean and even most sunscreen stains came out pretty easily with a swipe of a soapy sponge. It’s also water resistant to protect your gear in brief showers, though the material will soak through after a prolonged time in the rain.

Whichever color you prefer, everything on the bag is that color. The zippers are dyed to match, the zipper heads and pulls are the same hue, and so is all the hardware on the bag, from the adjustment slides to the snap that holds the wrap around the tote handles. While the zippers and hardware aren’t from any recognizable brand, we’ve had no issues with them, and they’re continuing to hold up well. The adjustment slides stay in place, and the zippers open and close easily.

Branding on the bag is limited to a tiny rubbery patch sewn onto the right side of the bag and the brand name debossed on the plastic zipper pulls.

There are three ways to get this backpack where you want it to go. The first is by the tote handles we mentioned earlier. They are a satiny webbing that’s folded in half at the top for a little extra heft when you’re holding it. A wrap at the top holds them together, so they don’t bump up against the back of your neck when you’re wearing it like a backpack, which we appreciate. They’re convenient for hanging the bag on a hook or off a table with a Heroclip.

You can also slide it over the handle of rolling carry on luggage as you make your way through the airport using a wide luggage pass-through on the back panel. We found this super convenient, especially when waiting in a long line at customs, just to take the weight off your back, but you don’t feel it when you’re wearing it as a backpack either.

Obviously, you can also carry the Away Featherlight Backpack on your back. The harness system is minimal, with lightly padded shoulder straps and a slightly more padded back panel. There isn’t any breathable mesh, so things could get a little sweaty after a while, but since this isn’t a hiking backpack that you’ll be wearing for a long time outdoors, we don’t mind.

Fit Notes

With the monochrome hues, the Away Featherlight Backpack has a clean, minimalist look and feel. It’s a casual bag, which is why we liked taking it on vacation, but it looks nice with more casual dresses and nice travel pants, as well. In other words, it won’t look out of place in the airport, at a local museum, or while exploring a new city. We even carried it to the beach, the pool, and lunch around the resort, and it worked out fine.

The adjustment slides stay where you place them, yet they are easy enough to use when switching users. Differently-sized users find the bag comfortable, although it definitely seems to be designed for smaller frames more than larger ones.

Inside The Pack

There are two compartments to fill with gear on the Featherlight Backpack, plus a side pocket. We’ll start there with the stretchy pocket on the left side of the bag. It’s a water bottle pocket, and we can fit a Standard-Mouth Hydro Flask inside, though it can be a tight fit that requires some effort to wedge inside, depending on how much gear you have in the main compartment. Since it’s so tight, our bottle never slid out or around, but sometimes we really had to jostle things around and push hard to get it in. The slim pocket would also work well for a travel umbrella, though there aren’t any drainage holes if it’s wet when you put it inside.

Then, there’s a front pocket that takes up more than half of the front of the bag. The zippers for this area and the main compartment are covered with a fabric welt to keep rain from seeping through, yet we never had any issue with it getting caught in the zipper.

Inside, you’ll find a few additional pockets. Two slip pockets topped with elastic have a little airplane patch sewn above them, perhaps because they’re designed to hold passports. They accommodate a minimalist wallet, battery bank, or other small travel accessories, as well, but they really are the perfect size for passports, and we found it nice to know exactly where our documents were whenever we needed to show them to an official. This isn’t the most secure space to stow them, so you’ll want to put them somewhere safer once you reach your destination, but it’s convenient when you’re pulling them out and putting them away during a trip.

Behind those pockets is a larger pocket with a zipper top. It’s just a dump pocket for smaller travel accessories (we tossed AirPods, hand sanitizer, and tissues inside) that you don’t want falling to the bottom of the larger front pocket. There is quite a bit of space remaining here, and we used it for a phone, snack bars, and other bits and bobs we collected throughout the trip that we didn’t want to get lost in the larger main compartment, like a seashell and banana chips.

That main area is accessible via a double-headed horseshoe-style zipper, which gives you good access to the bag’s interior. Against the back panel is a lightly padded sleeve for up to a 14-inch laptop or tablet. The sleeve is not raised off the bottom of the bag, and the padding is pretty minimal, so you’ll want to take care not to drop the backpack on the ground if you have a sensitive device inside, or you may want to add a protective sleeve if you have a smaller laptop or tablet.

The remaining space is open for interpretation. For the flight, we packed books, an extra layer for the plane, and travel documents. In daily use, the bag easily accommodated sunscreen, books, sunglasses, a swimsuit coverup, and a waterproof phone case that went in and out of use depending on the day. Since we were taking it on a sunny vacation, we made good use of the tote handles so we didn’t accidentally rub sunscreen off as soon as we applied it, and with the size of the bag, they worked well. The Featherlight Backpack also comes in a larger size if you need more space, but this was enough room for small travel accessories and the minimal daily use we needed on vacation and a daily commute to and from the office.