Travel review: Kathmandu 70L Hybrid Trolley

Kathmandu Hybrid Trolley bag. 70L. Photo / Supplied

I like steak, and I like icecream. So it stands to reason that a steak-and-icecream sandwich would be my idea of bliss on a plate, right? Not necessarily (though I reckon my 4-year-old son would go for it).

Into the confusing fish-nor-fowl world of hybrids comes the Kathmandu 70L Hybrid Trolley. You can wheel it around, or wear it on your back.

I've been kind of intrigued by hybrid bags — that's a bag that can be worn as a backpack or trundled along as a wheelie bag — ever since my mum brought one with her when I travelled around Europe with her one summer 15 years ago. I ended up carrying Mum's bag a lot — and it was a cumbersome beast, good neither for trundling nor slinging over your shoulder and with too much of the interior space lost to straps.

Things have improved in the hybrid market. It might even be time to put preconceptions aside.

Kathmandu's newest bag weighs in at a svelte 3.42kg — which is pretty good in the luggage stakes. It comes in a couple of colours — and if you can't choose between the predictable black and the locatable blue, then you haven't spent long enough standing at crowded luggage conveyor belts.

The wheels at the base are easily tucked in out of the way and the handle for trundling is straightforward. Getting out the pack straps is a more fiddly business but not onerous.

There are faults, it doesn't balance on its end (standing upright) as neatly as a regular wheelie case would — it really should balance better as its prime use will be as a trundling bag, with all the standing around in airport queues travel entails. Also, I always reckon there ought to be more compartments inside packs and cases for documents and knick-knacks.

Mostly, I trundled, but the pack wore comfortably, too — it came close to winning me over. Maybe I should give that steak-and-icecream sandwich a go.

Kathmandu 70L Hybrid Trolley
$549.98