Travelpro vs Delsey

The published figures

The most interesting cell is the empty one

Delsey does not publish a price for this case on its own US site in a form we could read and date. Retailers publish prices for it constantly, and they vary enormously — which is the problem. A retailer’s number is a promotion, not a manufacturer’s published figure, and this site does not feed promotions into its arithmetic.

The practical consequence is that the Delsey cannot be scored on value at all. Its overall score of 3.3 is built from the axes that do have published inputs, and the page tells you which ones those are rather than quietly filling the gap. The scoring method explains how a missing input is handled.

That is not a claim that the Delsey is bad. It is a claim that you cannot check it, and on a site whose entire premise is re-derivable arithmetic, that is a real cost.

Three pounds is not a rounding error

The Delsey publishes 8.4 lb empty. The Maxlite 5 publishes 5.4 lb. That 3 lb gap is:

• 12 percent of Hawaiian’s published 25 lb cabin cap, which counts the bag
• 8.6 percent of the 35 lb cap Frontier, Breeze and Sun Country publish
• Roughly four shirts and a pair of jeans, on any reasonable packing estimate

Most US carriers publish no cabin weight limit, so for many trips this is simply three pounds you carry. On the carriers that do publish one it is three pounds you are not allowed to pack. Which carriers publish a cabin weight cap has the full table.

Ten years against no stated end date

Delsey publishes a 10 year limited warranty. Travelpro publishes a warranty with no stated end date on both cases here, and the Platinum Elite adds published cover for airline handling damage once the bag is registered.

Converted to the same currency — cost per covered year, on the published 20 year horizon this site uses for open-ended warranties — the Maxlite 5 comes out at $8.00 and the Platinum Elite at $19.50. The Delsey cannot be converted, because the numerator is missing.

None of them fits the strict box

All three publish an overall height of 22.5 to 23.5 in, over the 22 in limit that eight of the eleven US carriers we track publish. Each clears the same three: Southwest, Frontier and Sun Country.

The Delsey is also the widest at 15.25 in and the deepest at 10 in, which helps nowhere — width and depth are the dimensions the roomier carriers are generous about anyway. The bags that do clear the strict box is a different and much shorter list.

The verdict

Buy the Travelpro Maxlite 5 if

You want the cheapest route to an open-ended warranty and the lightest of these three. At a published $160 and 5.4 lb it is the best cost per covered year on this page by a factor of two, and the lightest wheeled case in our whole ledger.

Buy the Travelpro Platinum Elite if

You gate-check often and want the published airline-damage clause. Register the bag on arrival — unregistered, that clause does not apply.

Buy the Delsey if

You have found it heavily discounted and you have weighed the three extra pounds against the saving yourself. It is the only one of the three whose value we cannot do that arithmetic for, so the discount has to be visible rather than assumed.