Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Tony Ho Loke

Say the words “travel wallet” and one of the the last words that would come to your mind as a description is “compact.” Travel wallets are meant to be the one place where you keep all your important travel documents and on a long haul journey, that can mean anything from passports to airplane boarding passes to that 3 page print out of your itinerary. In this situation, what you need is space and that’s not a quality to apply the less is more concept.

Bellroy, an Australian bag company is attempting to do just this with a compact, billfold version of a carry all wallet. I had a chance to take it on the road for a weekend cross country trip to the left coast and knock it around.

The first thing you’ll notice is that “compact” is a relative term. As men’s wallets get smaller and smaller to accommodate a few bank cards and bills, the Bellroy Travel Wallet in comparison looks positively Mastodonian:

But the dimensions of the wallet was built around a standard passport, which slips right into a pocket when you flip the thing open:

A good design call on this feature, most customs and immigrations folks want you to hand over your papers unencumbered by a fancy case. And if you’re paranoid about losing things like me and pat yourself down at least three times a day to make sure you didn’t forget something, having your passport front and center means less time freaking out.

The billfold area is divided into two sections—one for money and the other for other travel documents—tickets, receipts, folding up pieces of paper. The size was just right for my boarding passes and it was good to have everything airport security people want to check in one place:

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