If was asked by a PR person for Gate8 to review their trifold cabin bag that is currently on sale on their website for $149.00.
Gate8 Trifold Cabin Bag
The Gate8 Trifold Cabin bag consists of a main luggage portion along with a zipaway laptop bag. It also included a sturdy shoulder strap and a clear pouch for toiletries.
Shoulder strap
Benefit booklet
A long, telescoping handle comes out of another zipped up pocket for pulling the bag. Once again, the handle feels very strong and sturdy.
The overall feel of the bag was high quality with strong zippers and lots of pockets.
The handles for the zipoff laptop bag are cleverly hidden behind zipped pockets.
Zippers
The laptop bag has plenty of room, even for big laptops. My 17 inch Dell fit nicely in the laptop sleeve.
Place for laptop
The main compartment has room for two full suits to be hung on hangers and includes a shoe pocket.
Main compartment
1 suit in the Gate8 bag
In each corner is a zip up pouch to hold items.
Pouch in the corner
I was able to fit my size 14 Allen Edmond shoes in the shoe pouch without any issue.
Shoe pouch
A sturdy hang up hook is at the top concealed behind another zipper.
Hang up bag
With a suit in the bag
Easily separated from the main compartment, the laptop bag is sturdy with lots of outside pockets and very light. I really wish the Tom Bihn bag that I’ve been using had outside pockets like this.
Laptop bag
As a test, I packed in 1 suit, 1 Dell laptop and 1 pair of shoes and zipped it all up. This is where some problems occurred. The bag would not stand upright and kept falling as you can see from this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukq9g-wBTAU
I tried putting it at different angles but couldn’t get it to stay upright.
Fallen bag
My only recourse was to put the telescoping handle down and then it would stay upright.
Performing in real life situations
I took this bag on a trip last week to Southern California. My remedy for the bag tipping over was to detach the laptop bag and hang it from the handle. This seemed to help counterbalance the bag.
In our tiny CRJ-900 on Skywest, the bag fit into the overhead compartment without any issue.
Fits in the bin
Overall I would say that this is a very sturdy bag, will strong zippers, lots and lots of pockets and storage room. It’s overall well built and for $149 seems very nicely priced. I was disappointed that I couldn’t get it to stand upright with my suit, laptop, and shoes in it.
@David – I don’t have any contact information for them. That is not a good look for them.
I ordered this bag and the handle broke. I emailed customer service, they said they would send me a replacement but they have stoped responding to my emails and I have yet to receive a replacement. Do you have any contact information for them? @alistar can you help me?
Hi Jason,
Firstly many thanks for taking the time to review one of my products, the Road Warrior Tri-Fold Garment Bag. The USA is a new market for GATE8 and I am really pleased to see the positive response and feedback from both customers and the media to my new UK brand.
If I can just comment and offer a suggestion on a couple of the honest observations you have made.
1) With the larger laptop, size 17inch, which as you have shown, fits into the laptop bag, it can sometimes cause some stability issues. Therefore in my experience, it is beneficial to store the shoes in the “top corners”, rather than the pocket at the bottom to improve this behavior. i.e. in your picture labelled “1 suit in the Gate8 bag” remove the x 2 corner pockets (via the velcro) and replace with each shoe (in a dust bag), your size 13’s will fit 🙂 – having the shoes in this position has in my experience increased stability when traveling with larger (more heavy) 17 inch laptops.
2) With the laptop bag zipped off, I noticed you “hung” the laptop bag over the main garment bag trolley handle via the laptop bag handles. You do have the option of unzipping the “back” pocket (top + bottom) of the computer bag as this acts as a sleeve to slide over the handles – this is a more elegant and stable way of traveling with the two bags unzipped – I hope this makes sense.
There are also some very useful consumer reviews and videos of the GATE8 Tri-Fold on the FlyerTalk website – I hope you do not mind me posting a link here as it specifically discusses the improved stability of the version 2.0 of the product you have reviewed:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-products/1523273-gate8-trifold-garment-bag-version-2-0-detailed-review.html
Once again, many thanks for taking the time to review GATE8.
Regards Alistair.
@Alistair – thanks for your feedback regarding your bag. I will try the modifications you suggested.