Convertible Bike Backpack Pannier

Like the previous reviewer I felt compelled to write a review, as I have been using this bag for at least a couple of years whatever the weather and am still delighted with it!! I cycle approximately 70 miles a week with it, often at full capacity, and nothing has broken yet. I would agree that sometimes it's a bit faffy to do the zips up when heading into the office, but other than that it's been brilliant.

After about two years of using this bag almost daily, I’m still really happy with it. It just works well as a commuter pannier where you need to also carry your bag some distance off the bike. It unzips and locks to the pannier rack in seconds, and is very solidly fixed, even for a fairly rough towpath commute. It has carried a laptop and everything else I need to carry to work, as well as being useful on a day out. When taking it off the bike, it can be tricky to zip it back together as a back pack, but only if it’s overloaded. The red interior makes it easier to find things inside in low light. The rain cover works well, but it stands up to a light shower without. The inner panels, where the pannier fixing are located are a tough vinyl type material. These get dirty in the wet, and dusty when it’s dry, but because they zip together, you never see it. After many hundreds of commutes, the only parts to fail are two of the zipper pullers. The string snapped on one of the heavy duty joining zips, and the rubber coated puller came off the front compartment zip. Both of these are due to overloading the bags. Otherwise it’s lasted really well. When using it as a backpack, I occasionally get comments from people asking if my bag is open. This is because the top of the two halves do not fit closely together, because of the pannier fittings, so there is an air gap. My only recommendation for a redesign would be to stagger these fittings, maybe vertically, to reduce this gap. I haven’t seen a similar bag from any other manufacturer that looks like it would work this well, even for twice the price. I’ll probably get another when this one wears out.

It'll have to do until I can find something better. This product is missing velcro straps to fasten it lower down the bike rack, beware it flap's around. I've had to buy some bungees to make it work. The whole point of this bag was to carry less stuff and now I need to carry more stuff.