DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner Review

When traveling for business or as a digital nomad, it’s nice to pack just one bag (or one plus a sling) to avoid being weighed down by your gear. However, if you don’t want to carry a travel backpack and prefer rolling carry on luggage, it can be harder to find a spot for your laptop.

That’s the problem the DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner is trying to solve with a laptop compartment that’s accessible without opening the entire suitcase. But does it work well enough for you to get work done at the gate while waiting to board? And can it stand up to the rigors of travel? We took it on a 10-day trip with two plane rides and one cruise ship to find out.

External Components

The DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner is a 21-inch piece of hardside luggage made with glossy polycarbonate. That’s a material we’ve seen on countless pieces of hard luggage, but it varies as to how sturdy it is on each piece. Unfortunately, the polycarbonate on the luggage from DELSEY Paris isn’t as durable as we had hoped. Don’t get us wrong, there are no dents or cracks in the bag after taking it for our test trip. The lightweight material is supposed to be resistant to cracking and breaking, and it has done that. However, we’re not used to seeing this many gouges in the finish after just one trip, especially when it was in our tester’s possession most of the time.

Whether from the edge of the overhead bin on the plane—where it fits well, at least on a U.S. Delta Airlines flight—or from careless handling by cruise ship employees checking it in and returning it to port, the shiny red colorway has scrapes, scuffs, and scratches it did not have when leaving home. Whose fault it is may be debatable, but you can encounter careless baggage handlers on any trip; you want your bag to withstand the abuse it’s sure to get. In the case of the DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner, it doesn’t.

Looking around the rest of the bag, you’ll find a circular, metallic DELSEY Paris emblem on the front, SBS zippers to enter each compartment and to expand the bag when you buy too many souvenirs, and really nice carry handles. There are two—one on top and one on the side—and each is plastic on top with a rubbery underside. They expand easily when you want to grab them and lay closer to the bag when not in use. While we used the telescoping handle most of the time, it’s nice to have comfortable carry handles when you need to lug your bag upstairs or heave it onto the luggage rack.

Returning to the zippers, you’ll see they have large metal pulls with plastic accents. Those accents separate the compartment zippers (with black accents) from the expansion zipper (with a red accent, regardless of colorway). You can slide a travel lock into the laptop compartment zippers, and the main compartment ones click into a TSA-approved combination lock on the side, which includes a way for officers to enter your bag with their own key if necessary. The lock isn’t the easiest to use. Unlocking is easy: push a button on the end closest to the carry handle, and it moves two bars holding the zippers in place out of the way. To lock it, however, you must balance the zippers upright, and they tend to want to fall to one side or the other, so it doesn’t always connect as easily as we’d like.

The telescopic handle lacks the soft rubber underside of the carry handles, but is still comfortable to hold. It extends with the press of a button on top, so you’re unlikely to release it accidentally when pulling the bag with you. There are two height adjustments, with the shorter one perfect for rolling it beside you and the longer one better if you need to pull it behind you. That depends on your height, of course. However, it doesn’t always lock into place at the shorter adjustment. When we pulled it up quickly, the handle often extended unevenly, so it couldn’t click into the designated holes. That happened more often than we’d like to see and slowed our tester’s roll; she had to take more care and sometimes fully extend the handle and then push it back where she wanted it. After testing tons of luggage for Pack Hacker, that’s a first, and we hope it’s the last.

The handle has a considerable amount of play in it, too, wiggling quite a bit when you’re walking briskly, especially over uneven surfaces. So, while the carry handles shine above other carry on luggage we’ve tested, the extendable handle falls short.

The wheels fall somewhere in the middle. Four sets of two rubber-coated wheels spin and roll fairly well, especially over smooth surfaces. They’re not the smoothest wheels we’ve tested, nor are they the worst, though.

Fit Notes

We struggle a bit when rolling the bag over uneven or rough surfaces, though we’ve determined that the difficulty has more to do with the wiggly handle than the wheels. It seems like the wheels were rolling along over carpet and doorjambs just fine, but the bag felt like it was pulling against our tester because the handle didn’t stay rigid enough to keep up. That happens when turning corners, too, which is not a great experience when rushing to get to your hotel room so you can change and enjoy the pool.

However, thanks to the four wheels, the bag stands easily on its own when waiting at the gate or cruise port, even when expanded to hold more gear. Packing the laptop compartment on the front doesn’t make it front-heavy, which we also appreciate.

As for aesthetics, we really liked the glossy finish of the DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner out of the box. The Brick Red colorway we tested has a gem-like quality, as do the other available colorways, from Brushed Charcoal to Blue Cobalt and Peony Pink. Unfortunately, it loses some of that panache when you see black scuffs and scratches in the finish.

Inside The Carry On Luggage

Of course, the point of all that polycarbonate is to protect your gear inside, so let’s look at what you can pack where.

Against the front of the spinner is the laptop compartment rated for up to a 15-inch device. It opens with dual zipper pulls running down the side of the bag and angling to the front at the bottom. Those curves are where the zippers want to get stuck, though, and we had to wrestle with them quite a few times when trying to close it back up. The zippers also catch on the gussets, which prevent the front panel from falling forward. They’re held together in the middle with hook-and-loop fasteners and a snap so that you can open the front panel all the way, but if you don’t refasten it exactly right afterward, you’ll create another spot where the zippers get stuck.

Your laptop slides into a padded sleeve against this front panel, and there’s another padded sleeve adjacent to it for a tablet or a second computer. By the way, that’s why you want to keep the gussets engaged; if the panel falls flat, your devices start sliding out as there isn’t a strap or any other means of keeping them in place, so we don’t recommend doing that when traveling with a computer.

On the opposite side of the compartment are two large zippered mesh pockets for accessories like wall chargers, battery banks, and a travel mouse. However, we must tell you that this compartment shares space with the front half of the bag. If you stuff the inside of the bag like we did for a 10-day trip, you’ll find this space very tight. The gear from the main compartment presses into the laptop area, making it difficult to squeeze your device back inside when it’s time to board. When engaged, the side gussets hold the lid closer to the bag and don’t leave much space for your computer to get back into its sleeve, nor for you to access the two zippered pockets opposite it.

However, you don’t get all of the space in the main compartment if you’re not carrying a device, so you can’t, say, pack accessories in a tech kit and store them there instead of the zippered pockets. You’ll just have to eliminate shoes, clothing, or toiletries to make space for your work gear, just as you’d have to with a travel backpack. The room has to come from somewhere! We also recommend that if you happen to be taking a trip without a device but still want to use the bag, you’ll want to use the laptop compartment for any flat gear, from a book to gloves or a packable backpack.

Getting into the main compartment is different from most rollaboards and spinners. Most of the time, you can open a bag when its back is on the bottom. However, the DELSEY Paris Helium Aero Carry-On Expandable Spinner opens seemingly backwards. By that, we mean that the side with a zippered panel holding your gear in place is along the back instead of the front. So if you place the back side on the ground (or bed or luggage rack) as you would any other piece of luggage and then open the bag, your packing cubes or clothing can come tumbling out, as only stretchy, X-shaped compression straps hold them in place on the front side. You’ll want to lay the suitcase on its front to open it or risk having gear spill out. We think this is because of the laptop compartment; you’ll be accessing that separately, so it lies on the floor while accessing the main area. However, it’s counterintuitive if you’ve tested as many roller bags as we have, and it took us quite a few times of getting it wrong before we learned to do it the right way. Stopping to think about how to open your luggage is not something you necessarily want to do after getting up at 4 a.m. to catch a flight and then traveling for hours, trust us.

As with zippered panels on many other pieces of luggage we’ve tested, there’s a large zippered mesh pocket on the face where you can stow flat travel essentials like gloves. We didn’t use it much because we used the tablet sleeve in the laptop compartment for that size gear instead, but it’s there if you need it. Underneath is the half of the bag that’s up against the telescoping handle, so you must pack carefully to make the best use of the space. We tucked sandals, soles down, in the middle, with socks, underwear, and swimsuits around the remaining edges, then placed a toiletry bag and a shoe pouch with our other travel shoes on top of the now-flatter surface.

There’s also a long zippered pocket attached between the two halves of the bag. We used it to hold long, flat cruise luggage tags while on the first portion of our trip, but otherwise left it empty.

Finally, the front, shall we say, third of the bag is open space where we stowed our compression packing cubes full of clothing. It’s also the side with the expansion zipper if you bring home an extra pair of Crocs or another hoodie you didn’t anticipate needing to pack. However much space you have to fill, we recommend using packing cubes on this side if you have them. That certainly made it easier to repack everything the few times we opened the bag backwards, and they began to fall out; we can only imagine the mess if you did that when clothing was held below the compression straps instead. Again, it’s DELSEY Paris’ prerogative to design their bag however they wish, and you’re sure to get used to it quickly if it’s the only bag you own, but it’ll catch you up if you often bop between different brands of bags or even different options from DELSEY Paris.

Now, after listing some of these considerations, we have to point out that DELSEY Paris is not the most expensive or premium brand. So, maybe you think that a few design flaws are worth living with to save a few bucks (or Euros or Yen or … you get the point). However, we’ve tested other budget brands without some of these drawbacks, so we’d rather not compromise. Not as many carry on, hardside bags offer laptop compartments, though, so if that’s important to you, it may be worth the scuffs and wobbly handle. After all, you’ll get used to the quirky organization fast.