A long day’s journey home has begun. Packed and ready, but packing is definitely not one of my hidden talents.

You would think that after decades of traveling and thousands of hotel nights, I would have developed some kind of technique or knack for it. But not a chance.

When it comes to packing a suitcase, I am actually a disaster. There is simply no happy medium – either I pack like I’m moving abroad for good, or I realize too late that I’ve forgotten some of the most important things I wanted to bring.

But my biggest problem is still the total lack of structure. No matter what I do, it always ends up with everything sitting in one chaotic, unsorted mess.

I push down, squeeze, and close the lid with brute force, which results in me completely losing track of what’s inside. If I need to grab a specific sweater, I have to root around like a badger and pull everything out onto the hotel bed before I can find it.

But now, I’ve discovered vacuum-packed travel bags. They might not help me become more structured in my packing, but I seem to fit significantly more stuff.

The concept is ingenious in its simplicity: you just stuff the clothes into the bags and suck out the air with a pump (or, a vacuum). Suddenly, that huge, cumbersome mountain of socks, underwear, t-shirts, shorts, and everything else has shrunk into flat, rock-solid, and ridiculously easy-to-pack packages.

The best part isn’t even that you save about half the space in your bag – though that is a massive plus. Through the transparent bags, I can see exactly where my things ended up. “Neat and tidy” might be stretching it, but at least I get a decent overview.