Packing for a Trip Where You Know You Will Buy a Lot

Some trips are shopping trips whether or not anyone admits it in advance. A week in Tokyo, a few days in Seoul, a run to Bangkok with a list from three other people. The outbound packing gets done carefully and the return leg gets thought about on the last evening, in a hotel room, surrounded by things that were not there when you arrived.

The return leg is the actual packing problem. The outbound one is easy — you own everything, it all fits, and you have done it before. Almost everything that goes wrong on a shopping trip goes wrong because the trip was packed as though it ended the way it started.

Work out what you are actually carrying home

Most people estimate their spare capacity by feel, and the feel is generous. It is worth being more honest than that before you leave, because every option gets cheaper the earlier you take it.

Two things to check before departure, both of which take a few minutes:

• What your specific fare actually allows on the way home. Not the airline's headline figure — the allowance attached to the fare you booked, on the route you are flying, in the direction you are flying it. These are not always the same in both directions, and on a multi-airline itinerary they can change partway, which is a problem worth understanding before you are standing at a transfer desk.
• What you are already using. Pack for the trip, then look at what is left. If the honest answer is "nothing", that is useful information while you are still at home and have choices.

Go out with room, not with a plan to make room

The standard intention is to wear things and throw away packaging as the trip goes on, freeing space as you accumulate. It works less well than expected. You wear things and put them back. Packaging turns out to be what is protecting the fragile purchases. The space never quite materialises.

Travelling out with genuine room is simpler. It is also the least glamorous advice in this article and the one that makes the most difference: take less than you think on the way out.

A trip where you know you will buy is the one trip where the usual rules about packing light stop being about discipline and start being about arithmetic.

The fragile things decide the plan, not the bulky ones

People plan around volume — will it fit — and then discover the real constraint was protection. Bulky purchases are an inconvenience. Fragile ones are the reason a return journey goes wrong.

Ceramics, glassware, bottles, framed things, anything with a delicate corner: these need to travel in the middle of a soft mass, surrounded on every side, nowhere near an outer wall of the bag. That is a structural requirement and it eats far more space than the object itself.

So the order of operations is backwards from how most people do it. Decide where the fragile things are going first, build the packing around them, and put the bulky-but-tough items wherever is left. Clothes are packing material on a return leg — that is now their job.

The other consideration with bottles and anything liquid is that some of it cannot travel in the cabin at all, and duty-free is its own separate trap on a connecting itinerary — worth reading why duty-free purchases get taken at transfer security before you buy on the way home.

The four ways to solve a space problem, in order of cost

1. Take a foldable bag out with you. Flat and weightless on the way out, a checked bag on the way back. This is the cheapest solution and it has to be decided before you leave, which is precisely why people skip it.
2. Add allowance in advance. Almost always cheaper bought ahead than at the airport, and it is a calmer transaction sitting at home than at a check-in counter with a queue behind you.
3. Buy a bag while you are there. Sometimes genuinely sensible, particularly if you needed one anyway. Less sensible as a panic purchase at eleven at night near a hotel, which is how it usually happens and rarely produces a bag anyone keeps.
4. Ship it. For heavy, awkward or genuinely valuable things, this is often the right answer rather than the defeat it feels like. Ask about it at the shop rather than working it out afterwards.

The pattern across all four is the same: each is cheaper and easier the earlier you decide. The airport is where all of these options are at their worst and most expensive — see avoiding the check-in surprise.

Sort it out at the shop counter

The counter is where the return leg is quietly decided, and most people walk away from it too quickly.

• Ask for it to be packed for travel, not for carrying. Shops that sell to visitors are usually good at this and will do it properly if asked. It is a different job from putting something in a bag for the walk home.
• Keep the receipt somewhere you can find it, not at the bottom of a shopping bag. You may need it for tax refund procedures, for customs, or later for a warranty or an insurance claim.
• Ask about tax refund paperwork at the time of purchase, because it generally cannot be arranged afterwards, and the process usually has to be completed before you leave the country.
• Ask what you are allowed to bring home. Food, plants, seeds, alcohol quantities and anything made from animal products all have rules — both where you are and back in Singapore. The shop will often know the common cases, and Singapore Customs is the authority on what applies on arrival. Checking beforehand is much better than finding out at the red channel.

If you are bringing food back in particular, the practical question of what actually survives the journey is a separate one from what is permitted — we covered it in bringing food home in your luggage.

The night before, not the morning of

Repack properly the evening before you fly, with everything out on the bed, rather than compressing it at six in the morning.

You want to find out that it does not fit while there is still a shop open and a front desk to ask about a box. You want to weigh it — most hotels can help, and a rough check is far better than none — while you can still move something into a carry-on. And you want to know what is where, in case a bag is opened for inspection.

It is also the moment to move anything genuinely irreplaceable into the bag that stays with you: documents, medication, anything small and valuable, anything you would be upset to lose. Checked bags do occasionally go missing, and a shopping trip is the journey where the checked bag is worth the most — if that does happen, our note on the first 24 hours with a delayed or lost bag covers what to do.

One thing worth accepting

You will buy more than you planned. Everybody does, and the planning is not really an attempt to stop it — it is an attempt to make it cost nothing extra.

A foldable bag in the bottom of your case, twenty minutes of honest arithmetic before you leave, and a habit of asking at the counter rather than the airport covers almost all of it. It is a small amount of preparation for a trip you are looking forward to anyway.

Related reading: when your baggage allowance changes mid-journey and carry-on only on short Asia trips. If the return leg is the reason you need another bag, the VOX shop is here.

Related: sailing from home rather than flying to the port changes what you can bring back — see cruising from Singapore.

Also worth reading: sending your bags ahead — when shipping beats paying for excess baggage.

Shopping in Japan before a train leg? A case that expands can end up over the Shinkansen size line — see taking a big suitcase on the Shinkansen.

Related reading: coming home with shopping - Singapore's GST relief, the liquor combinations and when to head for the Red Channel.