We Test 5 Supersized Suitcases

WHEN IT CAME TO luggage, Samantha Brown's top priority used to be how pretty it looked. But that was before she came back from a weekend on Jekyll Island, Ga., with her then-boyfriend, Kevin. Her sleek, black Hartman bag showed up on the baggage-claim conveyer belt with a "bright pink thing" along for the ride on top of it. That turned out to be her underwear, which she had tossed into an outside pocket. "Some baggage guy must have taken it out and just thrown it right on top," she says. Brown was mortified and tried to hide the sight from Kevin. Too late.

Brown kept Kevin around (she married him), but she traded in her luggage for bags with plenty of compartments and features. Turns out she was on to something. After years of emphasizing sleek carry-on pieces, luggage manufacturers are seeing a revival of the big, bad bag, supersize luggage with loads of extra pockets and storage space to separate a lot more than just lingerie. Sure, we still love our compact rolling carry-ons, but the airline industry seems to have the upper hand when it comes to getting travelers to consolidate their bags. With airlines now charging fees for a second checked piece of luggage — and American Airlines ready to charge even for the first — while banning second carry-ons, more fliers are opting to go for one big bag.

Fortunately, today's giant suitcases are no longer the glorified steam trunks your parents lugged around airports. The finer pieces come with easy-to-use handles, wheels that work, extra garment bags, and a slew of pockets on the inside and outside. And thanks to better materials and engineering, the newer bags are lighter than prior models, a major plus since most airlines now charge as much as $100 for luggage weighing more than 50 pounds. The trade-off for all these features: price. Most feature-laden big bags are at least $700 (Louis Vuitton has one selling for $2,995). But the sticker prices haven't deterred travelers. Nearly $2.1 billion worth of bags were sold last year, up almost 8 percent from 2006, according to the Travel Goods Association. Manufacturers say checked bags are selling even faster than carry-ons, a reversal from a few years ago.

It was money well spent for Brown, who knows a thing or two about living out of a suitcase. As the host of the Travel Channel's Passport series, she travels three weeks a month, 10 months a year — sometimes having to pack for two different climates in one piece of luggage. We caught up with Brown at her Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment between trips to Washington, D.C., and Bozeman, Mont., where she's filming for her new show, Passport to Great Weekends. She still cares a lot about how her bag looks ("Most people have cars to show off; my luggage is my wheels"), but she's happy to help us test the latest batch of big bags luggage manufacturers have to offer. We want to check out not only the various features of each bag but also how each one will withstand the rough treatment luggage occasionally gets from airport baggage handlers.

With that in mind we roll out the first suitcase, the Zero Halliburton 28-inch Classic PC ($995). And the case moves around extremely easily thanks to having four wheels, unlike our other bags, which have just two. Its electric-blue hard exterior makes it look more like a car door than a piece of luggage. The Halliburton is the lightest of our cases, only 15 pounds. It's made of the same material as bulletproof windows, and indeed, the bag is pretty tough to dent. But bulletproof doesn't mean scratchproof. The shiny exterior picks up smudges and scratches when we "accidentally" throw it down the stairs. Our expert also is initially perplexed about how to open the case. Unlike with many bags, the Halliburton's handles have to be pulled out first and then turned. But a bigger problem is the bag's lack of exterior pockets, a feature Brown calls a must for any suitcase.

Next up is the Longchamp 30-inch Boxford ($665). It's the narrowest of the bags we've brought, but it holds up well when we subject it to the falling-down-the-stairs test. The bag has three inner and outer pockets and includes a nice-size garment bag. The narrowness, however, is a detriment if you want to place a carry-on bag on top of it and wheel them together, a common enough occurrence. Our carry-on barely fits on top of the suitcase, and it falls off when we wheel the bag around — not something we want to see if we're running to catch a flight. And the suitcase's design, two-tone canvas with leather accents, might be chic in some corners of the world, but not to our expert. "It looks like something Willy Loman would use," Brown says.