How We Test & Recommend Travel Products
Travel-tested, traveller-approved. That's not a slogan we threw on a label to sound good. It's the actual standard we hold ourselves to before recommending anything. Between us, the GO PAC team has flown into well over a hundred airports across dozens of countries, Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, the full European circuit, and the kind of long-haul routes where you get to properly road-test a neck pillow. We've carried an enormous amount of travel kit over the years. Some of it was brilliant. A surprising amount of it was dreadful. A few things were both, depending on the airline. This page explains how we decide what makes the cut, and what doesn't.
Four rules, no exceptions
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01
We use it ourselves first
We don't review from press releases, unboxing videos, or the word of a brand's PR team. Every product we recommend has been used by at least one member of the GO PAC team on an actual trip, not a test run in the living room, an actual trip. If it hasn't left the country with someone, it hasn't earned a recommendation.
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02
It must solve a real problem
"Solving" a problem we've invented to sell something doesn't count. Travel is already complicated enough. Every product we recommend needs to make a journey meaningfully better, not just different, not just photogenic, not just newer. Better. If we can't explain what problem it solves in a single sentence, it doesn't make the cut.
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03
We test against the alternatives
Is it actually the best option at that price point? We don't recommend in a vacuum. When we review a travel pillow, we've slept on several of the main alternatives. When we recommend a power bank, we know what else £80 buys. If a cheaper option does the job just as well, we'll tell you that instead.
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04
We update when products change
Manufacturers quietly downgrade materials, change build quality between runs, or swap components mid-production without updating the product page. We notice. If something we recommended gets meaningfully worse, we update the review and pull the recommendation. A recommendation on this site reflects the product as it currently ships, not how it launched two years ago.
What we won't recommend
There's a lot of travel gear out there that looks brilliant in an unboxing video and falls apart by the second trip. We've owned most of it. We won't recommend:
- Things that look impressive in photographs but fail in real travel conditions, the classic "too good for Instagram, too bad for airports" problem.
- Products with clever marketing but genuinely cheap build quality. The nice packaging is not the product.
- Anything that solves a problem we've had to invent to justify its existence. Travel doesn't need more solutions in search of problems.
- Gear we haven't used personally. Secondhand opinions get labelled clearly when we include them.
"If it's naff, we say so. Even if the brand is paying attention."
How we keep the lights on
We believe in being straightforward about this. GO PAC earns money in two ways: affiliate commissions and GO PAC Merch direct sales.
When you click a link to Amazon, Awin, CJ, or Skimlinks on this site and buy something, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Our Amazon tag is gopacuk-21. We also work directly with brands including Trtl, Manta Sleep, Cabeau, Tortuga, Pacsafe, and Antler.
We also sell GO PAC Merch, our own curated travel kits, towels, and gear, which we make and ship ourselves from Lincoln.
Affiliate commissions never influence which products we recommend. If they did, we'd lose the only thing that makes this site worth reading: your trust in it. The moment a reader notices we're recommending something because we get paid more for it, rather than because it's genuinely good, this whole thing stops being useful. We're not interested in that trade. For the full picture, see our affiliate disclosure.
Want us to test your gear?
Send it our way
If you make travel gear and you'd like us to test it, email us at gopacuk@gmail.com. We consider every submission, though we test a fraction of what we receive. We don't guarantee a positive review. We do guarantee an honest one. If your product is genuinely good, we'll say so, and if it's not quite there yet, we'll tell you why. Some of our best brand relationships started with a polite "not quite" and a frank conversation about what needed fixing.