Bellroy Venture Travel Crossbody Review

Since before the dawn of time, people have needed a way to carry the essentials from place to place. Whether the sporran of Scotland or the satchel of the Roman empire, we always seem to need to carry more things than we can hold in our hands. Hence the popularity of slings and bags like the Bellroy Venture Travel Crossbody, which hang by your side, ready and waiting for your gear.

At 3 liters, it’s a good size for everyday and a trip, and we’ve been testing it at the grocery store, to and from work, and while exploring local colleges and universities. Suffice it to say, it’s taken a lot of walks, but is it worth bringing along on your next adventure? Let’s find out.

External Components

Sometimes you can tell a Bellroy bag by its cover, and sometimes you can’t. The Venture Travel Crossbody is a bit in between, with recycled nylon materials, the lowercase Bellroy logo on the front, and an AquaGuard-style YKK zipper into the main compartment. OK, that’s all similar to slings like the Bellroy Venture Ready Sling and Bellroy Lite Sling Mini, yet the DWR coating on the front gives the recycled nylon a slightly shinier finish on the front, and the zipper only opens in one direction.

At the time of this review, the leather-free bag only comes in Jet Black, but we don’t mind the dark aesthetic because it goes with just about everything except formalwear. The zippers have paracord pulls wrapped in heat-shrink material, which makes them easy to grab and also makes them look less casual by covering the cord.

There aren’t any carry handles other than the shoulder strap. However, it connects via Bellroy’s custom carabiner clips, which stayed in place for our tester throughout the testing period. That means that if you wish to remove the slash-resistant webbing strap, you could do so and use the crossbody more like a pouch instead of a sling. While, again, this is something we’ve seen on other Bellroy bags, it’s a nice option in case you want to go sans strap or want to wrap the strap around a fixed object, like a chair.

That’s pretty much it for the outside of the bag and the harness system. There isn’t much going on outside the crossbody, and we’re OK with that. Sometimes, simple is best.

Fit Notes

Even stuffed full, it’s hard to weigh the Venture Travel Crossbody down enough to be uncomfortable. Now, much of that has to do with the fact that you just can’t stuff it full of much heavy gear, which we’ll get to shortly, but the bright side is that you don’t have to worry about the strap pulling at your neck or digging into your shoulder.

It’s a sleek little bag that can look professional or casual, depending on what you’re wearing, so we have no problem using it in various situations. However, the material does seem to attract light-colored dirt quite easily, so you’ll want to give it a good once-over before taking it somewhere on the dressier side to make sure there aren’t any white patches hanging around. They mostly brush or wipe off, but they do tend to accumulate without our knowing.

Inside The Sling

First up, let’s chat about the pocket on the back of the bag. It has a hidden zipper that’s rather nicely concealed, although the heat-shrink-wrapped corded pull is a bit of a giveaway. That zipper is easy to open, revealing a thin pocket that extends to the bottom of the bag and spans its entire width.

It’s especially good for thin gear, like your passport or wallet, although there’s a more secure spot for those in the main compartment. We tended to fill it with lip balm and gloss, tissues, and mints. At first, we just tossed everything willy-nilly inside, but the first time we needed lip balm, we regretted doing so. It was so difficult to fish out the lip balm from the bottom of the pocket that we immediately unpacked and reorganized our gear. We found that by lining everything up like orderly little soldiers, we could grab what we needed when we needed it without issue. In our case, we tucked tissues to one side and stood a neat row of lip balms and glosses beside it. It shares capacity with the main compartment, which doesn’t have a ton of room either, so when that space presses into the outside pocket, it can be a tight squeeze to wedge your hand inside and wriggle it around.

Before we head into the main compartment, we want to point out that there are gussets on each side of the crossbody, which—in theory—allows the bag to expand when you put more inside and slim down when you carry less. However, it doesn’t quite work that way in practice.

The main compartment zipper has one head that closes on the left side of the bag and opens toward the right. Since the top is always pinched on the right side by the zipper, it’s hard to stuff too much gear on that side, and in fact, that gusset remains creased pretty much no matter what.

Then (bear with us, we’ll get to the organization soon), while you can stuff a lot more gear into the left side, it’s then difficult to zip the bag closed. So the gussets are really more for being able to see your gear when the zipper top is open than for giving you more space for gear.

That hiccup aside, let’s head inside to see what space you do have to fill.

Against the front are two stretchy mesh pockets. They’re large enough for an AirPods case, a battery bank, or a few travel-size bottles, and we’ve been using them for said AirPods as well as hand sanitizer and lotion. Above the right-most pocket is a corded key leash. We like using it because it can be hard to see into the space right in front of these pockets when they’re full, and having the leash allows us to just pull the cord to get our keys without digging around. The clip is a simple press clip; nothing fancy to talk about here.

Opposite the key leash, on a stiff middle divider, are two skinny slip pockets for pens or a stylus. The crossbody is tall enough to accommodate a pen, and we’ve had no issue carrying one there throughout our testing period. In this case, the tight quarters work in your favor because the pen never slides out of its slot.

That hard divider has a secret. It’s actually an RFID-protecting pocket for your wallet and passport that fastens at the top with a hidden magnet. We have no problem tucking a minimalist wallet inside, and it has space for more gear, though the magnetic topper may not connect if you stuff too many items inside.

Behind that, another divider creates two flat yet wide places to store gear. We tossed our phone against the back panel (behind the divider that doesn’t include the RFID pocket) and slid receipts, slim notepads, and the like between the two dividers. You can also slip gear in between the front stretchy pockets and the RFID-pocket divider, as well; we’ve got a Matador Waterproof Travel Canister with some medication, a scrunchy, and, on the left-most side that the zipper closes on, a pair of sunglasses, but things get tight rather quickly. We were concerned about crushing the sunglasses when carrying a phone and AirPods inside the crossbody and found it best to pick and choose which two out of the three really needed to go inside at any given time.

In practice, the Bellroy Venture Travel Crossbody functions a lot like the Bellroy Toiletry Kit, but for different types of gear. That is to say that there’s a lot of useful organization to hold your gear, but using everything at the same time makes things pretty tight. You have to slot things in perfectly every time to make them fit, and that’s not always easy to do on the go. On the bright side, you always know exactly where to find the gear you need without having to dig for it in the abyss of an open pocket. So, if having extra pockets and dividers is your jam, this may be the best travel crossbody for you. If you dig the size but regularly carry bulkier gear, however, you may want something with a bit less rigid organization.