Away Featherlight Sling Bag Review

We love slings. They’re the most convenient way to carry small travel accessories without weighing down your pants’ pockets—and you can usually fit more inside even a small sling than you can in your pants unless you have huge cargo pockets.

Those are just a few reasons we were excited to get our hands on the Away Featherlight Sling Bag. We’ve tested other Featherlight products from Away and like their lightweight feel and organization. However, while the materials are similar, the Featherlight Sling Bag has some unique design features that we were interested in trying out in our daily commute, for shopping, and for attending games and other sporting events. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

External Components

We’ll begin with the materials since they are essential to making this bag as lightweight as possible. The exterior polyester twill fabric is super soft and flexible. While the pastel colorways, like the Arctic Blue we’re testing, mark up a little easily, you can clean spots with soap and water when necessary. It’s machine washable, too. If you don’t want to worry about that, grab one of the darker colorways, like Jet Black, Amaro Brown, or the deep Misty Purple available at the time of this review.

The material is water resistant if you get caught in a brief shower, and all the hardware, from the YKK zippers to the Nifco Hardware buckle, matches your chosen colorway. Sometimes, it’s hard to match different fabrics and materials, but Away has dyed everything to match, and it all does nicely.

There’s a little bit of Away branding on the side pocket, and the name is stamped onto the plastic zipper pulls, as well, but it’s pretty minimal in keeping with the sling’s clean aesthetics.

The only way to carry this 1.1L sling is by the strap; there aren’t any carry handles. However, its small size makes it easy to grab and pull over your head, so we didn’t miss it like we would on a larger bag.

There’s a little bit of padding along the entire bag, including the back panel that rests against you. It’s quite minimal, so you might feel something poking out of the bag into your body, but that didn’t happen too much during our testing period, probably because the main compartment allows gear to shift around. You can move the offending object pretty easily without opening the bag.

There isn’t any padding on the strap, which is a wide, satiny webbing. We didn’t miss it on a tiny bag, but we did miss a tighter strap keeper. It seems like looking a gift horse in the mouth to complain about this—after all, we’re happy there’s a keeper at all! However, this one is so loose that the strap just slides around anyway, creating a loop of the excess instead of a dangling strap. It’s a different problem, yet still, a problem and many users complain about it; it’s not just us that it bothers. You could slide on a hair tie or other piece of elastic to hold it in place, but the chance of you being able to match the color as well as Away is slim.

Fit Notes

Since this sling is so lightweight, it’s comfortable to carry. After all, you can only fit so much heavy gear inside unless you load it up with rocks. Even if you use it for rock collecting along the shores of Lake Superior, we don’t think you’ll find it too uncomfortable since the strap is soft and broad to spread out the weight.

Because the materials are so slippery, it does tend to shift around while you’re wearing it, so we find it creeping towards the waist when wearing it crossbody on the front. However, that’s easy to readjust when necessary and can be solved by tightening the strap further than our tester prefers.

As for aesthetics, it looks great… except for the loop created by the extra strap since the keeper doesn’t stay in place. If Away were to swap the webbing keeper out for a piece of the same-colored elastic, we’d have no notes because this is just as nice-looking as the other crossbody bags and backpacks in the Away Featherlight line.

Inside The Sling

You might be surprised to learn that a 1.1L sling has not one but two secondary pockets, yet here we are.

The more common addition is the front pocket, which opens with a horizontal zipper across the bag sheltered by a fabric welt. We didn’t run into problems with the welt getting stuck on the zipper here, which is nice, and it opens to reveal a small pocket that we used for small gear like lip balm, a nail file, an emergency bandage, and some mints. Your mileage will vary, but hopefully, that gives you a good idea of what you can stash inside. Your wallet would, for example, if you preferred to keep it there instead of the main compartment.

Off to the left side of the bag (as you’re looking at it) is a tiny pocket attached where the strap is on the other side. The strap extends from its left, leaving you with a zip-top pocket perfect for our favorite brand of hand sanitizer, which has the same size and shape as a standard AirPods case. Of course, you could also use it to hold your AirPods, as long as they’re not in a separate protective case on top of the one that charges them (that makes them too big) and that they are not a differently-shaped other brand.

It’s a rather specific shape. We also think it’s a good spot to hold loose change if you end up with a lot of coins or other tiny gear you need. This pocket ends up being more convenient than you may think, mostly because there is no organization in the main compartment, so it gives you a spot to lock at least something down instead of having it jostle around with the rest of your travel essentials. Your lip balm would fit here, for example.

The main compartment zipper is also protected with a fabric welt, which occasionally gets stuck in the zipper as it runs around the top corners of the bag. It happens more when you overstuff the inside, but it happens enough to mention.

Inside, you’ll see the Away logo on the back wall, and that’s it. It’s just a simple dump pocket for your remaining gear, from your minimalist wallet to your phone, passport, a foldable tote bag, sunglasses, a travel size bottle of pills, and another of hand lotion. You get the idea. The material is flexible and wraps easily around bulky gear, although you can see the outline of bulkier items from the outside of the sling, so keep that in mind when packing if that bothers you.

However, minor irritations aside, the Away Featherlight Sling Bag really is a convenient way to carry the essentials throughout the day. Its monochrome aesthetic looks nice with casual clothing and dressier options (i.e., it works with a dress with no pockets or a swimsuit and T-shirt), and it’s a great way to get your phone, wallet, keys, and more around with you as you explore a new place.