I travel with hand luggage only. This is a choice I made about four years ago after one too many experiences of waiting at baggage reclaim for a bag that had been sent to the wrong airport, and it's a choice that has required me to think carefully about every item I pack. The Playshoes Microfibre Bath Towel in Blue is the item that solved the towel problem — the specific challenge of needing a towel that is large enough to be useful, light enough to not eat into my weight allowance, and compact enough to fit into a carry-on bag alongside everything else. It's been in my bag for eighteen months and I've never once wished I'd brought a different towel.
The Towel Problem for Hand Luggage Travellers
Most hotels provide towels. Most Airbnbs provide towels. But not all of them do, and the ones that don't are often the most interesting places to stay — the small guesthouses, the rural rentals, the places that ask you to bring your own. If you travel with hand luggage only and you don't have a compact towel, you're either paying for a hotel that provides them or you're buying a towel at your destination and leaving it behind. Neither is ideal.
The beach and pool situation is the more consistent problem. A standard cotton beach towel is large, heavy when wet, and takes hours to dry. In a hand luggage bag, it takes up a third of the available space and adds significant weight. A microfibre towel that dries quickly and packs small solves all of these problems simultaneously, and the Playshoes towel does it at a size — 70x140cm — that's genuinely useful rather than just technically portable.
Finding the Playshoes Towel
I found the Playshoes Microfibre Bath Towel in the Beach Towels collection on ALTOE. The specifications were the ones I was looking for: quick-dry microfibre, compact pack size, and the UV protection 50+ rating that I hadn't specifically been looking for but immediately recognised as valuable. UV protection in a towel means you can use it as a wrap or a cover-up at the beach and have meaningful sun protection, which extends the usefulness of the towel beyond just drying off.
The Oeko-Tex Standard 100 certification was the quality indicator that confirmed the fabric was worth trusting. Oeko-Tex Standard 100 means the towel has been tested for harmful substances by an independent institute — it's the certification that tells you the fabric is safe against skin, which matters for a towel you're going to use directly on your body. The blue colourway is the practical choice: it doesn't show sand or dirt the way lighter colours do, and it doesn't fade the way darker colours sometimes do in sun and salt water.
The Quick-Dry Reality
I want to address the quick-dry claim specifically because it's the claim that matters most for a travel towel and the one that's most often overstated. The Playshoes microfibre towel dries significantly faster than a cotton towel — in warm weather, it's dry to the touch within thirty to forty minutes of use, which means you can use it at the beach in the morning, pack it damp, and have it dry by the time you reach your next destination. In cooler weather it takes longer, but still significantly less time than cotton.
The practical consequence of this is that you never have to pack a wet towel and leave it in your bag for hours. That's the specific discomfort that a quick-dry towel eliminates, and it's the quality that makes the difference between a towel you use once and leave behind and a towel you bring on every trip.
Eighteen Months of Travel and Gym Use
The towel has been on twelve trips in eighteen months — city breaks, beach holidays, a hiking trip in Scotland, two work trips where I needed a gym towel. It's also been my regular gym towel between trips. It has been washed approximately forty times. The blue has not faded. The microfibre has not degraded. The quick-dry performance is unchanged. The UV protection, which is built into the fabric construction rather than applied as a coating, is unaffected by washing.
It has been used as a beach towel, a pool towel, a gym towel, a picnic blanket on a damp hillside in Scotland, and a wrap on a cool evening at an outdoor restaurant. The 70x140cm size is large enough for all of these uses. The compact pack size means it's always in my bag, which means I always have it when I need it.
My Recommendation
If you travel with hand luggage, go to the gym, spend time at the beach, or do anything that requires a towel away from home, the Playshoes Microfibre Bath Towel is the towel to have. The quick-dry performance is real. The compact pack size is genuinely compact. The UV protection 50+ extends its usefulness beyond just drying off. The Oeko-Tex certification means the fabric is safe. The 70x140cm size is large enough to be useful rather than just portable.
You'll find it in the Beach Towels and Towels collections, the Linens & Bedding range, and the broader Home & Garden collection on ALTOE. Put it in your bag. Leave it there. Use it everywhere.
— Ben Calloway, travel writer, hand-luggage-only evangelist, and person who has used the same towel as a beach towel, gym towel, picnic blanket, and evening wrap in the past eighteen months, Bristol
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