Calling All Packing Cube Afficianodos

Great timing with this thread! We were just talking about ordering packing cubes for our trip in a month and debating which brands to try. I am leaning toward Amazon Basic after looking on the website because the ebags were twice the price. Are the small and slim sizes worth getting or should we just stick to medium and large? Family of four, myself, DH, DD14 and DD11.

As far as Amazon Basics go I find the large too big to be useful. The medium are great for shirts/pants/shorts outfits. The smalls and slims are good for socks, underwear, or accessories.

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Good to know. I was wondering whether the mediums or larges would be more useful. Thanks for the advice.

If you have a TJ Max or Ross near you, they often have these in their travel section for cheap. I have the Sharper Image ones I got there.

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It is a complete theme with my kids. No space is left untouched. The last time we traveled (before cubes) it took them all of 10 minutes to make the room look like an EF-5 tore through it. I swore it would never happen again. Now they all have their own color cubes and I have regained a tiny sliver of my sanity.

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For our most recent trip, my son asked me if he could get some packing cubes… a boy after my own heart. :heart_eyes: We hit a snag, however, when his underwear packing cube disappeared for three days at my mother’s house!

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Strategies for packing cubes? Are you able to fit all tshirts in a single cube, all shorts in another, etc?

Why wife did it this way for our last trip: The packing cubes were packed per day and/or event.

So, for example, on our drive down, one packing cube had all of our clothes for the next day plus pajamas.

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I like this strategy since we will be doing a split stay. Whether I can talk the rest of my family into that is another story.

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There are pluses and minuses to this approach. On the plus side, it makes things super easy in the morning, especially if you have young children. Throw them the “Tuesday bag” and away you go. :grinning:

On the minus side, it is not the most efficient way to pack, so your stuff can take up more space. However, the biggest minus in my mind is the cost - a packing cube a day per person can add up pretty quickly. That’s why most people who employ this strategy usually go with ziplock bags rather than packing cubes. If you want to up the organization a little bit, you could take each person’s ziplock bags and put them in a packing cube.

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Yes. This isn’t necessarily the most effective way if you have a few people. But in our case, we had 5 of us on our last trip, and we have packing cubes in a variety of sizes. I think we have a total of 9 (well, 8 after the Aldi one got ruined). But since we paid a total of $12 for all of them, not bad.

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I got inexpensive ones on Amazon. I researched and read and searched for deals. In the end I’d spent so much on the vacation. (You know how this works. One puchas at a time a d suddenly you have a credit card bill that will take 15 months to pay off.) I went with simething inexpensive with shoe bags. The color wasn’t as vibrant as in the picture, but they were great.

I have Gonex brand cubes. They were the best value for the specific sizes I need and they have worked great.

Like @thinkertink the cubes have been a game changer for my kid’s clothes. Last trip I used some for our Disney stay and some for the beach days and the suitecases didn’t get crazy. It was amazing!

I do ebags as well. I love them. I also have their mother lode backpack and 22” roller.

I have Lands End bags my husband bought me years ago. They’re fine I just forget to use them* and they don’t save space. I just bought him Gonex compression cubes (prime day deal) as we’re flying Frontier to WDW and I’m hoping to check just one bag.

*This is such a duh but I finally realized I should leave them in my carryon bag so I could find them more easily.

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I’m so glad someone asked this question, i looked at several options during prime day but they were only $1 or $5 off and I couldn’t decide if it would be beneficial to us. But on our next trip we are staying at Disney a few days before going on a cruise and it would probably be helpful to divide out our clothing, and separating out the cruise only items

This is where the larges came in handy for me, I had one half in one cube and the 2nd half in another. But had multiple outfits for a couple of days. I also have a separate one that holds all undies, socks, pjs and bathing suits.

We have used ebags and Eagle Creek cubes for a decade. When we started 10 years ago, DD21 and DS19, were old enough to pack their own clothes. We each have a set of small, medium, and large. We tend to go on annual 7-15 day trips. We use the big ones for shirts, pants, shorts, and dresses. We stack the top and bottom for the day together to make it easier to grab clothes. The small ones are for socks, and underwear. The medium ones catch the leftover clothes and accessories. The cubes fit into drawers in the hotel and nobody has to dig through everyone’s stuff to find their own stuff. Cubes were a game charger in organization. For shorter trips, we may take only one or two cubes. We even use cubes for overnight trips! Toiletries go into ziplock bags. When the kids packed to move into their college dorms, they packed their clothes into two sets of cubes!

I can see the convenience of packing clothes by the day for the whole family when there are very young children.

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So I bought some Gonex Compression Cubes during Amazon Prime because someone on Chat said they used them so that they can use a smaller suitcase. 2 large suitcases and a couple of carryons are challenging in trunks at destinations where we have a rental car.

Compared to our ebags and Eagle Creek cubes, the Gonex felt cheap. The zippers are half zips. The cubes do not open all the way. I filled one Gonex over the weekend and started to zip the compression. My husband looked at it and said, “I hope the zipper holds up!” I found it hard to zip the compression. The cloth kept on getting caught in the zipper.

We are not sure the compression bags are worth the hassle to maybe pack smaller suitcases. We will return the compression bags and stick with our regular packing cubes which are tried and true.

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