Travelling in the Rain: What Actually Gets Wet, and What to Do About It

Rain is the one travel condition nobody packs for. People plan for cold, for heat, for altitude and for long-haul flights, and then arrive somewhere in a downpour with a bag that has been standing on a wet ramp for twenty minutes and a change of clothes they now cannot use.

Leaving Singapore, this catches people out twice: once at the destination, and once on the way home, when a bag full of damp clothing goes into a flat where the air is already humid. Neither is about buying anything. Both are about knowing where the water actually reaches your things, and packing so that it does not matter when it does.

The flight is the dry part

A checked bag spends the flight in an enclosed hold. That is not where it gets wet.

It gets wet in the twenty minutes at either end, on a trolley in the open, being loaded and unloaded on a ramp in whatever the weather is doing. It also gets wet in the walk from a taxi to a terminal door, on a ferry deck, in the back of an open pickup on an island transfer, and standing on wet ground at a kerbside while you find your booking. The handling, not the flying, is the exposure — which is the same reason the rest of what happens down there matters, as we set out in what actually happens to your checked bag.

The useful conclusion is narrow and practical: you cannot control whether the outside of the bag gets wet, so plan for the outside getting wet and control the inside instead.

Control the inside, in three groups

Sort what you are carrying into three groups and treat them differently. It takes a few minutes at home and it is the whole method.

Things that must stay dry no matter what. Passport, travel documents, medication, chargers, cables, anything electronic. These do not belong in a checked bag at all, wet weather or not — the reasoning is in what never goes in checked luggage. Inside the cabin bag, they go in one sealed pouch rather than loose, so that a spilled bottle or a wet umbrella in the same compartment is an inconvenience instead of a disaster.

Things that would ruin the trip if they got damp. The clothes for the one thing you are actually there for: the interview, the wedding, the conference, the meeting. One sealed bag inside the case. Not because the case will flood, but because this is the single item where "probably fine" is not good enough.

Everything else. Ordinary clothes are fine. If they pick up a little moisture they dry.

The bag inside the bag

Two or three sealable plastic bags, folded flat, weigh nothing and are the most useful thing you can add to a case for a wet-season trip. They do four jobs.

• They keep the group above genuinely dry.
• They take the wet umbrella, the wet swimwear and the rained-on shirt so those do not sit against everything else.
• They isolate anything that leaks, which is the more common accident.
• They come home again holding whatever is still damp on the last morning.

Packing cubes do the organising job well and are worth using, but a fabric cube is not a moisture barrier. If something must stay dry, it needs to be sealed rather than merely sorted. This is one of the few places where the two are not interchangeable, and it is easy to assume otherwise once everything is neatly cubed.

Shoes are the thing that does not recover

Wet shoes are the one packing failure that spoils the following day rather than the current one. They take a night and a half to dry in a humid climate, and they are the item you cannot substitute — you can wear yesterday's shirt, you cannot wear yesterday's soaking shoes.

Two habits fix it. First, if the forecast is wet, the pair you wear on the plane should be the pair you would rather not ruin, and the second pair goes in the case — the wrong way round from how most people do it. Second, on a genuinely wet day, put a plastic bag between the wet pair and the rest of the case, and open them out rather than leaving them packed. Stuffing them with dry paper overnight moves more water than leaving them by a window in a country where the air outside is wetter than the shoes.

The return leg is the half people forget

The trip ends with damp clothes going into a case for a long flight home, and then the case sitting in a hallway in Singapore for two days because you are tired.

That is how the smell starts, and it is also how a bag develops mould in a storage cupboard — the same problem we wrote about in storing luggage in Singapore's humidity. The fix is two minutes long: damp items go home in their own sealed bag rather than mixed through the case, and on the day you land the case is opened and emptied rather than parked. If it has been rained on, wipe the outside and leave it standing open somewhere with moving air before it goes back into the cupboard.

A bag put away closed, slightly damp, in this climate, will smell in a week and will keep smelling.

The five minutes at the airport that matter

If it is raining when you leave, three small things are worth doing at check-in rather than discovering later.

Take the wet umbrella out of the outside pocket before the bag is checked. An umbrella in an external pocket is water inside the outer layer for the whole journey, and it is usually the reason a bag arrives damp when nothing else did.

Keep one dry layer in the cabin bag. Not for the plane, for the arrival: a dry shirt is the difference between a bad first evening and a fine one, and it costs nothing to carry. On a trip that crosses climates this doubles up with the layering approach in packing a trip that changes weather halfway.

Photograph the bag before you hand it over. Nothing to do with rain specifically, but it is the same thirty seconds, and it is the thing that makes a claim straightforward if the bag comes back damaged rather than merely wet — the process is in claiming for damaged luggage.

What is not worth doing

Rain covers for suitcases exist and mostly get lost, left in hotel rooms or torn off during handling. Wrapping a whole case in plastic film at the airport is a security-and-tamper service rather than a weather one; it may keep some water off, but paying for it as rain protection is paying for the wrong thing. And no case anywhere is a sealed box — every case has an opening, and openings are where water gets in.

The honest position is that keeping the outside of the bag dry is not really achievable and not really necessary. Keeping the right things dry inside it is both, and it costs three plastic bags.

The short version

• Bags get wet on the ramp and in the walk to the door, not in the air.
• Sort into three groups: must stay dry, would ruin the trip, everything else. Only the first two need sealing.
• Documents, medication and electronics travel in the cabin, in one sealed pouch.
• Packing cubes organise; they do not keep water out. Seal what matters.
• Wear the shoes you would rather not ruin, and pack the good pair.
• Damp clothes come home in their own sealed bag, and the case gets opened the day you land.
• Take the wet umbrella out of the outside pocket before checking in, and keep one dry layer with you.

If you are choosing luggage for the kind of trips where this comes up, our luggage guide for Singapore travellers covers how to think about it, and you can see the current range in the Vox Journey shop.