Some of our bags — such as the Cadet, Synik, Pilot, and Co-Pilot — have built-in rolling luggage handle pass-through slots. But what do you do if your bag doesn’t have a pass-through, or you have rolling luggage with a very thick, wide handle that can’t fit through the bag’s built-in pass-through?

There’s two solutions we can offer:

Option #1 Use the Webbing Waist Belt On the Bag You Have

This is admittedly a bit of a hack, but if you have one of our bags, you might already have what you need for it and, in that case, it’s free!

1. Remove the Gatekeeper Webbing Waist Belt that’s included with most of our larger bags.
2. Connect the two Gatekeeper clips together: now you’ve got a long strap with a male/female buckle closure.
3. Use that strap and wrap it around the middle of your Synik, Synapse, Pop Tote, Tri-Star or other bag as it’s sitting on top of your rolling luggage with its back against the handle of the luggage.
4. Clip the buckle around the rolling luggage pole.
5. Cinch the strap down.

Option #2 Use the optional Simple Rolling Luggage Lash Strap 

Don’t have a Gatekeeper webbing waist belt, or don’t want to remove it from your bag because you use it? We made a purposeful version of the strap that effectively does the same job: the Simple Rolling Luggage Lash Strap.

What We Like About This Strap-Around-The-Bag Solution

It’s simple and easy to use. And let us be clear: this is not some smart or revolutionary invention. It’s a pretty obvious, low-tech solution. If and until we invent something more clever, this is it. It’s possible that you’ve already discovered this solution on your own, and if that’s the case, kudos.

In our experience, the bag — Synik, Pop Tote, Tri-Star, Synapse, Guide’s Pack, whatever pack we offer, or even possibly a pack from a different brand — is effectively secured to the rolling luggage in such a way that it won’t spin around or slide off. It feels stable.

It feels more stable than a webbing or elastic band sewn to the back of the bag because it’s holding the center of gravity of your bag and all of its stuff against the rolling luggage handle. This is also the reason that it works better than using the sternum strap and waist strap on one of our backpacks to secure the bag to the rolling luggage.

It’s a solution that’s not built-in to the bag: you can use it when you need to use it, remove it and stow it in one of the pockets in your bag when not in use, or leave it at home when you don’t need it at all. (In fairness to the rolling luggage pass-through pockets on the Synik, Cadet, and other bags: they don’t add any bulk and are dual-purpose.)

Note: these solutions work with two-pole handle rolling luggage; they won’t work that well with the less typical one-pole handle rolling luggage.

We asked members of our Forums to help us test these methods; here’s the feedback they shared.

If you use either strap method, we want to hear how it works for you: feedback@tombihn.com