Away Travel Wallet Review

Quality travel gear just makes trips feel a bit more refined, and the Away Travel Wallet definitely fits the bill at first glance. Away has built a reputation around clean aesthetics and premium vibes, and this wallet follows suit, with a sleek, minimalist look that feels right at home alongside the brand’s luggage lineup. We’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks to see if that polished exterior translates into real-world usefulness.

A travel wallet lives at the intersection of form and function—it needs to keep critical documents secure while staying compact enough to move easily between bags, slings, or even pockets. With the Away Travel Wallet, the emphasis is clearly on presentation and materials. However, as always, we wanted to see how it performs when packed out with passports, cards, cash, and coins across everyday travel scenarios.

The Rundown

From a materials standpoint, the Away Travel Wallet leans heavily into sustainable design. The exterior is made from a 51% recycled leather blend, with 15% polyester, 14% polyurethane, and other synthetics. In hand, it feels closer to pleather than traditional full-grain leather, though it still looks premium and polished. Over our testing period, it held up well to drops and light scuffs, with dirt brushing off easily and no visible blemishes forming—though long-term wear remains an open question given its blended construction.

Inside, the wallet uses a 100% recycled polyester lining in select areas, while other sections maintain that slick, leather-like feel. The zippered closure uses OOK zippers, which we’ve generally had decent luck with. In this case, they glide smoothly around the corners without snagging, even when the wallet is fully packed. That’s a small detail, but an important one for a square-ish wallet like this.

In terms of layout, the Away Travel Wallet can hold up to four passports: three in the interior’s layered pockets and one in an exterior slip pocket. This makes it a solid option for families or couples traveling together who want to consolidate documents in one place. There’s also room for boarding passes, a passport-sized notebook, tall bills, and loose cash, thanks to the zip-around design. However, the emphasis on passport storage comes at the expense of card organization. The five card slots are tight, especially with slick plastic cards, and accessing them can feel fiddly. We noticed some stretching over time, but even then, cards remained harder to get in and out of than we’d like.

Coins fit in the zippered compartment, but adding change quickly makes the wallet feel bulky and uneven. While it’s nice to have a dedicated place for coins when traveling in cash-heavy destinations, the overall experience can feel cramped and slightly overstuffed unless you’re very intentional about what you carry.

Packability

Packability is where the Away Travel Wallet starts to show its biggest compromises. Even before it’s fully loaded, it’s a fairly large travel wallet. It balloons quickly once you add passports, cards, cash, and coins. In our testing, it took up a surprising amount of space inside a 4L sling, occupying a large chunk of the main compartment when placed flat.

That size makes it much better suited to living inside a backpack, tote, or larger sling rather than being something you move in and out of pockets. For most people, pocket carry just isn’t realistic unless you’re wearing something with very large pockets. Compared to slimmer passport wallets, the Away feels more like a small organizer than a true everyday travel wallet.

To be fair, some of that bulk is intentional. If you’re traveling somewhere where cash is still king and you expect to accumulate coins throughout the day, the extra volume can be useful. The problem is that you’re paying a constant packability penalty even when you’re not carrying much. If minimalism and flexibility are priorities, this wallet may feel oversized for the amount of usable organization it offers.

Quick Comparison

When we compare the Away Travel Wallet to similarly priced options, the trade-offs become more obvious. At around $100, it sits firmly in the premium category, alongside wallets like Peak Design’s Passport Wallet. While the Away offers more passport capacity, it’s significantly thicker and less efficient with space. Despite holding fewer passports, the Peak Design stays much slimmer even when fully packed and accommodates more cards overall.

On the budget end, wallets like the Zero Grid Passport Wallet deliver similar core functionality for a fraction of the price. They don’t look as refined and skip the leather aesthetic entirely, but they’re lighter, smaller, and more flexible. You also get more card storage and reliable YKK zippers, which we generally trust more than OOK over the long term.

Ultimately, the Away Travel Wallet feels priced for its brand and appearance rather than its pure performance. If you’re drawn to the aesthetic and want a single place to store multiple passports, it may still make sense. But from a strictly functional, packability-focused perspective, there are slimmer, more affordable options that cover the same use cases with fewer compromises.