What started as a simple question quickly snowballed into the analysis I'll describe below. Like many of the degenerate carriers on this sub, I frequently find myself consuming internet bag reviews. Sometimes, it's in preparation for a bag purchase; sometimes, it's recreational. For me, Pack Hacker (PH, henceforth) is typically a first stop whenever I'm researching a new bag. Deep into a review binge one night, I found myself wondering how much reviewer subjectivity impacted PH's scores. Each review is attributed to either an individual author or the "Pack Hacker Team." I was also curious whether their average scores had drifted over time. My theory was that an established site with a solid reputation, like PH, could afford to be more discerning with their reviews, so maybe average scores would decrease over time. Spoiler alert, this turned out to be wrong.
Over the past few nights, I ran an analysis of the "Bags & Luggage" reviews published on PH. There are just over 1,000 reviews in this category, making it a healthy dataset for analysis. Here are some of the top-level results:
Top-level analysis results from the Bags & Luggage category on PH
Initial takeaways (again, only pertaining to the Bags & Luggage category):
- The vast majority of bags and luggage receive a score between 7.0 and 8.5. The mathematical average across the entire dataset sits right at 7.58.
- The Pack Hacker Team handles the bulk of the reviews collectively (255 reviews), but when it comes to individual contributors, Lauren Maternowski (235) and Eric Hergenreder (208) are by far the most active gear testers on the site.
- I looked at the 10 brands with the highest volume of reviews on in the Bags & Luggage category to see which ones perform the best on average. Unsurprisingly, Aer, Peak Design, and Tom Bihn consistently earn the highest average scores, all sitting comfortably around the 8.0+ mark ("Great" status).
- PH's review output for bags and luggage has grown significantly over the last few years, with a huge ramp-up starting in 2022 and reaching its peak in 2025 with over 320 published reviews. They're currently on pace for 600 reviews in this category for 2026.
And down the slippery slope we go. Next, I wanted to answer the question I initially set out to address regarding reviewer bias and subjectivity. Here's what I found:
Average reviewer score given in the Bags & Luggage category
This is remarkably consistent. If we want to nitpick, the data could suggest that Tom tends to grade slightly more generously than the rest of the pack, averaging a 7.70. In contrast, Kristyne is the strictest grader among the top 5, coming in with the lowest average score at 7.50. Overall, though, a 7.50-7.70 spread on the average across reviewers is pretty tight.
Next, I wanted to curate a short list of superlatives. For your reading pleasure:
- Highest Rated Bag: The Aer Travel Pack 4 (35L) took the crown with a near-perfect score of 9.3 / 10
- Lowest Rated Bag: The Nomatic Travel Bag came in with the lowest valid score in the dataset at 5.4 / 10
- Most Reviewed Brand: Bellroy is the single most featured brand in the Bags & Luggage category, with a whopping 62 individual reviews
- Largest Capacity: The Rux 70L gear hauler topped the charts with a massive 70 Liters of storage volume
- Smallest Capacity: The Nomatic Access Pouch is the tiniest reviewed item, holding a microscopic 0.4 Liters (essentially just enough room for a phone, wallet, and keys)
Looking a little more closely at the sub-score categories (i.e., Form, Design, and Value). My AI assistant (Gemini, in this case) suggested a violin plot to compare this data. If you can look past the overtly sexual way in which this data is plotted, it's actually pretty interesting:
Get your mind out of the gutter
It seems that PH is slightly more critical of Value and Design than they are of Form. At the risk of over-extrapolating, maybe gear makers have gotten really good at making bags look nice and picking high-quality materials (Form), but they still struggle to perfect the internal layouts (Design) or justify the high price tags (Value). The sub-score averages:
- Form Average: 79.1 / 100
- Design Average: 74.9 / 100
- Value Average: 74.1 / 100
- Overall Average: 75.9 / 100 (Shown as 7.59/10 on the site)
And some updated superlatives:
- Highest Form Score: Veilance Nomin Pack
- Highest Design Score: Peak Design Travel Backpack 30L
- Highest Value Score: GORUCK GR2
- Lowest Form Score: AmazonBasics Carry-On Travel Backpack
- Lowest Design Score: Fjallraven Splitpack
- Lowest Value Score: Arkadia Sea To Sky Packable Daypack
The last thing I wanted to look at with regarding to the score values was whether there exists any correlation to other factors (including the year in which the score was generated). Here's a heatmap showing degree of correlation between the quantities that PH reports:
Heatmap showing correlation between factors for Bags & Luggage
Here is where my theory about score decreasing over time was disproven. There's actually a slight positive correlation between the Review Year and the Overall Score (as well as the Design and Value sub-scores). This suggests that as the years go on, the team is generally finding bags to be better designed and more fairly priced. Form, on the other hand, appears to be trending slightly down: while bags are getting better designed internally, the team is becoming harsher critics of the actual materials, aesthetics, and outer silhouettes.
I was also curious whether there was a score bias toward any particular bag type. Of the 1,079 bags reviewed by PH in this category, here's the score breakdown by bag type:
- Backpacks: 762 reviews (Average Score: 7.59)
- Sling Bags: 134 reviews (Average Score: 7.65)
- Rollers & Suitcases (Carry-Ons): 66 reviews (Average Score: 7.51)
- Tote Bags: 50 reviews (Average Score: 7.56)
- Duffel Bags: 34 reviews (Average Score: 7.59)
- Daypacks: 22 reviews (Average Score: 7.44)
- Camera Bags: 11 reviews (Average Score: 7.42)
You'll see here that slings actually hold the highest average score out of all the bag categories. Camera Bags and Daypacks, however, tend to score just a bit lower than the standard travel backpacks.
Last but not least, I wanted to get a sense for how the brands stack up against one another. Keep in mind here that not every brand has received an equal number of reviews. I've limited this list to only the brands which have received 5+ reviews by PH, which took the list from 204 brands down to 45. Here's the brand ranking, with the number of PH reviews in parentheses next to the brand name:
Definitive ranking of brands in the Bags & Luggage category
And here's a summary of the rankings:
- Best of the Best (8.0+ average):
- Goruck (8.31 / 8 reviews): GORUCK officially takes the crown
- Evergoods (8.18 / 23 reviews)
- Aer (8.11 / 60 reviews)
- Peak Design (8.04 / 27 reviews)
- Bottom of the Pack:
- Nomatic (7.15 / 20 reviews)
Ultimately, most of this analysis was unsurprising. Maybe the most surprising thing to me was how remarkably consistent PH is across their group of individual reviewers. They seem to be discerning when it comes to dishing out high review scores, which is obviously a good thing when many of us are leaning - in some cases, heavily - on their evaluations prior to making a bag purchase. If anyone is interested in any other plots, let me know and I'll do my best to generate them.
Disclosures: I am not affiliated with any review site. I'm just a dude who likes bags (and data).