Troubadour Goods Apex Travel Backpack Review

The last thing you want when heading out on a trip is packing headaches. Some travel backpacks require you to fill them “just so” to make the organization work, and we don’t think you should have to work that hard to go on vacation. The Troubadour Goods Apex Travel Backpack tries to solve some of these problems with a clamshell main compartment that includes built-in pockets, a well-organized admin panel, and an expansion zipper that takes the bag from 33 to 42 liters when you have to carry more.

How does it all come together? We packed it up for a weekend trip to find out.

External Components

Troubadour Goods uses the same materials on many of its products: recycled FortiWeave fabric, which is made with recycled plastic, vegan leather trim, and a nylon liner. The leather is mostly a pebbled accent at the top of the bag, though you can find it elsewhere around the pack, and the materials include DWR for water resistance.

YKK makes the zippers, and the entries to the front pocket, admin panel, main compartment, and laptop sleeve include AquaGuard coating for more weather resistance. So, while the Apex Travel Backpack looks sleek and aesthetically pleasing, it doesn’t skimp on features that should make it last.

Again, like on other Troubadour Goods products, branding is kept to a minimum. The brand name is in raised letters on the bottom front of the bag and along the vertical air channel on the back panel (thankfully not in raised letters). There are a few other nods to branding around the bag, but most of the brand logos are inside the bag, so they don’t detract from the minimalist look of the bag.

There’s a well-padded top carry handle that’s comfortable to hold but is a bit fat to hang up; it fell off our trusty desk hooks nearly every day during our two-week testing period. There’s a side handle that’s also comfortably padded and nice to hold if you have to carry the bag by hand for longer.

You can also slide the bag over your suitcase handle if you’re pairing it with rolling luggage. It’s built into the back panel padding, so it’s actually a piece of padding you pull out from the bag to slide over. The bag sits vertically, which we prefer, and you can tuck the shoulder straps away behind the pass-through, too, to keep them from flopping around as you walk through the airport or from catching on other bags in the overhead bin.

The harness system includes hardware by Duraflex, including a Magic Slider on the sternum strap. The sternum strap itself is attached to sliding rails on the shoulder straps, and we had no issue with the Magic Slider coming undone while our tester was wearing the backpack. However, it’s not the type of buckle that you can fasten without thinking about it; our tester found that she needed to look down at the sternum strap every time to line the right side up with the left side and slide it in. Hopefully, this would get easier with use, but there could be a learning curve every time you travel if you put the travel backpack back in the closet between trips.

The shoulder strap adjusters stay in place yet are easy to move when needed, and there are built-in keepers at the ends to keep extra straps from dangling. Instead, they create loops of strap that hang down, which is its own look, especially if you have the straps tightened pretty short. The elastic keeper on the sternum strap creates a better look but slides easily out of place, so neither option is exactly perfect.

The shoulder straps are curved for comfort and have smooth micromesh undersides that wrap around the inside of the straps near the top, so you only feel soft material touching your skin if you carry the bag while wearing a tank top. They’re quite flexible and feature a good amount of padding, and there’s an expandable pocket on the left-side strap where you can slip your phone to keep it within reach as you travel. It slides pretty deep if you have a smaller phone, so you might have to push it up from the bottom to get it out if you don’t have a larger model.

The back panel is well-padded and lined with the same micromesh as the shoulder straps. The padding is in striped sections running horizontally across the bag, only stopping in the center to create an upside-down T shape for an air channel. It comes together to create a pretty comfortable harness system, at least to a point. We’ll explain in more detail below.

Fit Notes

We won’t make you wait long for the nitty-gritty. When our tester packed the bag for a trip, she found it quite comfortable to carry, even though it’s long on her frame and rubbed slightly at the bottom. However, when she began reaching upward to place things on shelves in her camper, the straps immediately began to dig into the tops of her shoulders and the muscles between them and her neck. You might think that sounds like a unique set of circumstances, but if you have to hold onto the strap while standing on the bus or subway or reach up to grab just about anything, you’ll notice it. It’s potentially due to the flexibility of the straps; they simply fold under pressure instead of staying flat. Either way, it was an annoying occurrence after an otherwise comfortable carry.

The all-black material also gets sweaty fairly quickly, even with the air channels and micromesh; there’s just not enough ventilation. We find that on many travel backpacks, though, so we weren’t too surprised. We just wanted to mention it in case you’re planning to take a summer holiday to Rome or New York City and have a long walk to your accommodations.

However, if you walk around a metropolitan area for a while before you can check into your hotel room, we think you’ll like how the bag looks. Its sleek design blends well and doesn’t protrude much as long as you don’t shove a bunch of bulky items in the front pocket (which you should not, as we’ll explain later). All-black materials hide a lot of packing sins, though, so it’s not too noticeable, no matter what’s inside.

As we already mentioned, the bag is pretty long on shorter torsos, but that’s common with a bag that can accommodate more than 40L worth of gear. There aren’t too many bags of this size that truly suit smaller frames, though you can check out our guide to the best women’s travel backpacks for a few suggestions. Otherwise, it’s just something shorties have to deal with when we want a large travel backpack. At least this once can compress to be smaller when you carry less, so it doesn’t protrude too much off your back.

Inside The Backpack

Of course, the reason you’d want something this big is to pack for a longer trip in a backpack. Lucky for you, there are plenty of places for your gear in this bag, so let’s get to them!

You’ll see a strip of leather running vertically down the right side of the bag’s front. Hiding underneath that is a vertical zipper that opens to a large pocket. It spans the entire front of the bag below the leather accent piece on top, so we have plenty of room for a tech pouch, small notebook, gloves, a hat, and other travel accessories. You have a lot of room to pack here, but keep in mind that the lining of this pocket presses into the main compartment, making the base where you’re trying to pack lumpy. Because of that, we prefer to put flatter items here and try to keep them in one layer when packing for a trip.

However, this isn’t the only pocket you have to worry about, and the next one isn’t as easy to keep flat. It’s a quick-access pocket that opens with a horizontal zipper just below the leather accent at the top of the bag. The pocket itself falls behind the large front compartment we were just talking about, so even though it’s a smaller pocket, it also impacts the main compartment’s capacity. This pocket unfortunately has the key leash, so it might be bulky if you carry more than a few, have a fat fob for your car, or a big keychain. It’s attached to the top right of the pocket, and on the left, there’s a small pocket where you can tuck an AirTag. You can probably squeeze in a different brand of smart tracker if it’s a similar size, but it’s designed to work with Apple’s version (and even labeled as such).

We’re not done with front pockets, though. Running like a rainbow around the top of that leather accent (sorry if you’re getting sick of us mentioning it, but it’s a good geo-locator for the pockets) is a zipper that opens to the admin panel. Against the front is a large stretchy mesh pocket that we’ve been using for our glasses case because it’s super easy to access without dislodging anything else you have packed.

Across from that is another large zipper pocket made from soft fabric that we’ve been using for a small toiletry pouch, earbuds, and the wall charger and cord for our laptop. There are two slip pockets in front of it where you can tuck your phone, wallet, or passport. There’s plenty of space and organization in this portion of the bag to let you go without a separate tech pouch if you want, though we still like to carry one so we can move it easily to a travel daypack when we arrive at our destination. Unfortunately, again, this presses into the main compartment, so it’s something to remember when filling it.

There’s a bottle pocket on the right side of the bag (the one that doesn’t have the handle) with a fabric gusset and elastic top to accommodate wider bottles and hold nicely onto narrower ones. It’s pretty easy to slide your bottle in until you completely pack the main compartment—then it becomes more of a two-handed process as you pull out the top of the pocket and slide in your bottle.

The zipper closest to the back panel opens to the laptop compartment. It’s quite large and can accommodate up to a 16.5-inch computer, so it swallows a smaller 13-inch MacBook Air. However, this “Crashpad Cocoon,” as Troubadour Goods calls it, offers good protection for whatever size laptop you slide inside. The lining is super soft to prevent scratches, it’s well-padded against both the front and back of the compartment, and it’s raised several inches off the bottom to keep your laptop from slamming to the ground if you drop the bag or set it down too hard. We haven’t tried tossing the bag off a building with a computer inside, but it sure seems like the Apex Travel Backpack should protect sensitive gear from the bumps and knocks you’re more likely to encounter while traveling.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know there are still two zippers we haven’t covered yet. One has AquaGuard, and one doesn’t, which is how you’ll know which is which. The one that lacks the water-resistant coating is the expansion zipper, and it works just as you’d expect if you’ve used one on a suitcase; it runs around the entire perimeter of the backpack and unlocks a few more inches of material, giving you an extra 9L of space to fill with gear.

The AquaGuard zipper runs around three out of the four sides of the bag, just not the bottom, so you can open the back panel completely to fill the bucket space of the main compartment.

The lid has three large mesh zipper pockets that you can fill with accessories or small articles of clothing if you’re not using packing cubes. The center pocket is slightly larger than the other two, but they’re all sizable.

Inside the main bucket, there are two more mesh pockets, one on each side. They’re long and narrow, kind of like a pencil case, but we found them perfect for packing a weekend’s worth of socks and underwear so our tester didn’t need to bring a small packing cube on her trip.

Against the back of the main compartment (the front of the bag), is a feature we haven’t seen in other travel backpacks. It’s a mini compression panel that fastens with a FIDLOCK buckle, a feature akin to one you’d see in a suitcase. It’s supposed to help hold clothing in place if you’re not using packing cubes, specifically keeping items from sliding to the bottom of the pack. However, this is precisely where all the extra bulk from the front pockets presses in, so we found it harder to fill than we had hoped. On the other hand, we found it worked better when the bag was compressed and used for daily use. It’s great for holding a pouch, packable jacket, or something else off the bottom when you’re carrying less and don’t want everything to fall to the bottom because, well, gravity.

We had hoped to use it for a toiletry bag, but ours was too large for this trip and left unused space at the sides and top when we locked it down. After fighting with it for a bit when packing for her trip, our tester ultimately left it empty, lying flat against the back (front). It’s hard to say if it was because the clothing was too large or there was too much in the front pockets; either way, by the time we loosened the strap enough to go around clothing, the panel was only holding up the bottom few inches of gear. We don’t think it’s worth using with packing cubes, but it works if you want to keep a few T-shirts folded neatly at the top.

As with other travel backpacks, the Troubadour Goods Apex Travel Backpack is easiest to fill with packing cubes to keep things from sloshing around in transit. Even if you tucked a few tops or pants under that compression panel, you’ll have to fill all spaces around it in the bag to keep your clothing from sliding around as you walk. It’s possible, but you have a better chance of things staying where you place them instead of jumbling around if you use cubes or other organizers.

In all, you can easily fit enough gear inside the Troubadour Goods Apex Travel Backpack for a weeklong trip, depending on the size and bulk of your items. Obviously, jeans and bulky sweatshirts eat up a lot of space, but unzipping the expansion definitely helps. So, if you’re looking for a bag that will work well for a short trip but can accommodate more days’ worth of gear, this might be the bag for you. It has a few quirks (like that compression panel) and might require some careful packing (don’t overfill the front when you want to pack a lot inside), but it has many useful features to offer if you can use them.