Key Takeaways

You know the scene. You're at baggage claim, waiting. Around you, other travellers are already heading for the exit — backpacks slung over one shoulder, hands free, no queue, no fee, no faff. You've thought about it. You've looked at travel backpacks more than once. You've walked away every time.

Not because you don't want one. Because everything out there either looks like it belongs on a hiking trail, was designed for a 22-year-old on a gap year, or sits so badly on your shoulders after an hour that you'd rather drag a suitcase across cobblestones than wear it for another minute.

This piece is for that woman. The one who hasn't given up on the concept of a travel backpack — just on every option currently available.

Why Women Who Travel in Hotels Are Quietly Walking Away From Backpacks

Solo female travel is one of the fastest-growing segments in global tourism — and the numbers are striking. Around 84% of solo travellers globally are women. Nearly 40% of female travellers voiced interest in travelling solo in 2025, up 8 percentage points from the year before. The global solo travel market was valued at USD $482 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.07 trillion by 2030.

Women are the primary economic force driving one of the world's fastest-growing travel markets. The bag industry has been remarkably slow to notice.

Before designing a single element of PASSIA, we surveyed women on our waitlist about their real experiences with travel backpacks. These are not casual holidaymakers — they are women who travel regularly, stay in hotels and Airbnbs, and take trips of two to four weeks at a time. Here is what they told us:

87% purchase intent for a product that does not yet exist. That is not a niche frustration. That is a market failure.

One respondent put it plainly: "I don't use a backpack because I don't like my clothes getting crushed." She did not say she hated backpacks. She said the ones available had not earned her trust. That is a solvable problem — and it is exactly the one PASSIA was built to solve.

What Is Actually Wrong With Women's Travel Backpacks Right Now

They Are Built for the Overhead Locker — Not Your Shoulders

Most women's travel backpacks are designed around a single constraint: fitting under the seat or in the overhead bin on a budget airline. Ryanair. Jetstar. EasyJet. The design brief starts and ends with dimensions. Everything else — comfort, structure, wearability — comes second. Or not at all.

In practice, this means shoulder straps are functional at best and painful at worst. Waist belts — which can transfer up to 80% of a bag's load from the shoulders to the stronger muscles of the hips and legs — are either absent, flimsy, or designed with a hiking silhouette that looks completely out of place on a city street. For a woman carrying a loaded bag through an airport, across a train station, down a cobblestone alley to her Airbnb — that is not a small detail. It is the reason she buys a suitcase instead.

"Most women's travel backpacks are designed to do one thing — fit under the seat on a Ryanair flight. That's it. Nobody has thought about what it actually feels like to carry one for three weeks, whether it sits properly on a woman's frame, or whether you'd be embarrassed pulling it out in a nice hotel lobby. PASSIA is carry-on compliant, but that's the starting point — not the whole story."

— Tiffany Fowler, Founder of PASSIA

The Aesthetic Gap Nobody Is Talking About

The most common travel backpack colourways are black, charcoal and navy. The design language borrows from outdoor and hiking gear — compression straps, ventilated back panels, external attachment loops. These features communicate one thing clearly: utility above everything else.

For a woman checking into a boutique hotel in Lisbon or an Airbnb in Rome, the mismatch is real. This is not vanity. It is about a bag that works across the full context of how she travels — including walking into a restaurant, meeting a colleague, or navigating a city looking like she has her life together, not like she has just descended from a mountain.

Our survey found that the most desired aesthetic among women travellers was minimal and neutral, followed by practical with elegant touches, and clean and modern. Soft and feminine came further down the list. Women are not asking for a pink bag with floral lining. They are asking for a bag that does not look like it was designed for someone else entirely.

Organisation That Does Not Actually Work

52% of women in our survey said their bag lacked sufficient internal organisation. The standard travel backpack offers one large main compartment, a laptop sleeve, and a couple of small zip pockets. For women who pack thoughtfully — separating shoes from clothes, protecting skincare, keeping documents accessible, managing clean and dirty laundry across a three-week trip — that is not organisation. That is a void with a zipper.

Packing cubes are often held up as the solution. Our survey respondents were sceptical. Several described them as "extra material for no reason" or said they simply reduced usable space without solving the underlying problem. The real fix is a bag engineered around how women pack — not a generic interior with a bag-within-a-bag workaround sold separately.

What a Travel Backpack Actually Built for Women Looks Like

The answer is not a bag with pink stitching and a smaller laptop compartment. It is a bag engineered from the ground up around how women who stay in hotels actually travel.

That means a clamshell opening — the full bag opening flat like a suitcase, so you can see everything at once and reach what you need without dismantling the entire contents. It means a structured interior designed around real categories: clothes, shoes, tech, documents, personal items — each with a logical, dedicated home. It means carry-on compliance at 50×40×20cm, which works across the vast majority of airlines including budget carriers, without that being the only thing the bag is optimised for.

It means a removable waist belt — one that offers genuine load support when you want it, transfers weight to your hips and legs for long carry days, and comes off completely when you want a clean silhouette walking into a hotel. No hiking aesthetic. No straps dangling. Just a choice.

It means a refined exterior — structured, neutral, premium enough to feel appropriate in any context. The kind of bag that does not announce itself. That sits on the floor of a nice restaurant without looking out of place.

This is what PASSIA is. Not a hiking bag made smaller. Not a bag marketed at women because it comes in sage green. A travel backpack designed from scratch around the women who have been quietly opting out of the category for years.

The Woman This Bag Is Built For

She stays in Airbnbs and boutique hotels. She travels two to four weeks at a time — Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, wherever the next trip takes her. She packs intentionally, not lightly for the sake of it, but thoughtfully because she knows exactly what she needs and does not want to check a bag to get it there.

She has been carrying a suitcase not because she prefers it but because nothing in the backpack aisle has felt worth switching for. She has looked. She has walked away. She is not difficult to please — she just has standards, and the market has not met them.

She is not an adventurer in the outdoorsy sense. She is an explorer in the urban sense. She moves through cities, not trails. She wants a bag that works as hard as she does — and looks like it knows that.

It Is Not You. It Is the Bag.

Women who have walked away from travel backpacks have not been too fussy or too hard to please. The industry simply has not prioritised them. A market worth over $482 billion, driven predominantly by female travellers, has been served with bags designed by a different customer in mind.

That is changing. Slowly, but it is changing. And the women on waitlists for bags that do not yet exist — 87% of whom say they are ready to buy — are the proof that the demand has always been there. It just needed someone to build for it.