Giveaway- booq Taipan lift Checkpoint Friendly Laptop Bag

Posted on 25 February 2010 by


We’re snowed in here in the Northeast and the weather report indicates that this is going to keep up for lease an additional day. So what’s there to do? Watch movies and give great stuff away! That’s what.

And we have a pretty nice giveaway that starting right now.

During my recent jaunt to San Francisco I used one of booq‘s newest TSA checkpoint-friendly bags- the booq Taipan Lift. The bag has a number of features that make it an excellent travel companion. First, it has the ability to open only partway-30° to the precise, thus allowing you to reach into the bag and grab what you need without the risk of all of the contents spilling out. Second, with two simple motions you can unsnap the bag so that it opens down a full 180° which means that it can go through x-ray machine at the airport without removing your laptop. Third, the briefcase handles tuck away so they are not in the way when you are unzipping and using the bag messenger style. Finally, the back pocket can open on both the top and the bottom so that a trolley handle can pass through it — perfect when you need to move quickly toward your gate in order to catch your flight.

The Taipan lift has an MSRP of $89.95 (small) and $99.95 (large). They are available HERE but… we’ve got a brand new Taipan lift Large to give away — so read on.


booq describes the Taipan lift as a

Practical and compact checkpoint friendly laptop bag designed to move through airport security with ease

I found this to be entirely true. It made a GREAT travel companion. It features-

  • 1680 denier exterior fabric with water-repellant coating
  • Opens 30 degrees for normal use and 180 degrees so you may not have to pull your laptop out at security checkpoints
  • Fully removable shoulder strap allows for briefcase or over the shoulder carrying style
  • Large front pocket for boarding pass, wallet, water bottle, and other quick access items
  • Interior with multiple slip pockets and a densely padded Soft Nylex lined laptop compartment
  • Equipped with Terralinq service, helps reunite you with your lost & found bag

At $99.95 I think the bag is a good value. At FREE it is an even better one. So here is how to enter to win one…

Having gone through the panic of leaving my precious MacBook Pro in a cab in Las Vegas I want to know…

Your worst travel disaster story…

Leave yours in the comments below for one chance to win.

For a second chance to enter retweet this post.

For a third chance to enter tweet your story AND mention @GearDiarySite AND “booq”.


This post was written by:

- who has written 2795 posts on Gear Diary.

Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. +Dan Cohen

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  • uzziah0

    I was going to England on business, and got my sister to driver from her house (30 to 45 minutes from my house) to pick me up and bring me to the airport.
    On the way to O’Hare she is talking and talking, and a little distracted about her talking that she it going slow.
    (This was before 9-11 and I was told to get to the airport about 1 hour before the flight.)

    So, we get there a little later than I wanted, it was about a half hour drive. I went in, and she drove off.
    At the B.A. counter, I look at the woman, and she looks at me.
    The thought pops into my mind and before she can say anything I blurt out “I left my passport at home.”
    She says “You NEED a passport.”
    I say “I need a passport.”

    My sister has a cell phone, but I didn’t. So the lady at the counter lets me use her phone, and I finally get my sister as she is getting off the exit ramp. She circles right back on the entrance ramp, and heads back to the airport.
    The lady at the B.A. counter says she’ll hold my bags for me (they wouldn’t do that today)!
    Now I’m thinking I’ll never make it, and have to fly out Monday, and be late, and probably get into trouble with my boss.
    She gets back to the airport, drives me home, and I go in and get my passport, and we’re back on the road in a flash.

    I can’t remember much about the last trip, but she wasn’t talking as much, and driving faster.
    I get back to the airport, and don’t even look back at my sister leaving. At the counter, the lady helping me says its too late. The manager behind her looks at her watch, and picks up her radio and says “We can make that plane.”
    She talks into her radio and tells someone she has one more for the flight. She tells the guy in the doorway behind her to take my luggage to the baggage loading area. She (the manager) leads me through the airport, like the old O.J. Simpson commercial, running through the airport.
    She takes me to security, to the front of the line, and tells them to get me through. She pointed to me where the gate was, not too far, and I can see a B.A. attendant waiting at the gate, holding the door for me!

    I get through security quickly, with no problems, run to the gate, and they close the door behind me. I go down the tunnel, onto the pane, and they close the door behind me.
    I find my seat, everyone else is already sitting, and waiting.
    I can hear them loading luggage, and the captain comes on and says “We’re just loading some last minute luggage and we’ll be taking off.”
    I felt like everyone should be looking at me for delaying the flight, but no one seemed to notice!

  • Jaw3000

    Hmm, my worst tech travel disaster happened a few years ago after I had just purchased a new PowerBook for use in college. After going through airport security, the TSA agent proceeded to pick up the plastic bin containing my unprotected virgin PowerBook before I had a chance to get through the metal detectors. Noticing there was a laptop in the bin, the agent preceded to throw it back on to the metal table, knocking the PowerBook out of the bin, on to the metal table, and finally to the floor. The PowerBook’s aluminum was greatly dented, precluding use of the slot-loading SuperDrive & the screen latch was broken. Needless to say, I complained big time. The TSA manager on duty didn’t fain the slightest concern, only pointing to a sign saying something like the TSA is not responsible for any damage at all. This was back in the days before TSA-friendly bags like the Booq Taipan lift. Obviously, to avoid something similar happening again with my MacBook Pro, I could greatly use a bag like this. I’ve actually refused to travel with my Mac since, so it would be nice to be able to bring it with me again. I feel lost without it. Thanks for a great contest, and keep up the good work on Gear Diary!

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  • sdunietz

    I was traveling in Paris and Tuscany a couple of years ago. On the return flight, my family and I were supposed to fly Florence to Paris, Paris to Detroit, and then Detroit to Seattle. For some reason, the women checking us in at the Florence airport refused to check our bags through to Seattle. This meant that we had to retrieve our bags from baggage claim in Paris and check in and go through security again, all during an hour and a half layover. Nevertheless, the women assured us that we would make our flight easily.

    The flight came in around 20 minutes late. We raced to get our bags and re-check-in. This was right after the London subway bombing scare, so security was tight. We were stopped right before checking in by a women who asked us many security questions. After ten or so minutes of intense questioning, the women informed us that we could not check in because we had to check in at least one hour before the flight, and thanks to the questioning, we were five minutes late.

    Majorly annoyed, our family split into two. My wife acquired tickets to fly out the next day, and the rest of us checked in to an airport hotel. After my wife returned tickets in hand, my whole family enjoyed a relaxed dinner in Paris.

    The next day, we made sure that we got in line more than three hours early. We waited through the atrocious line (the Tour de France was just ending) over an hour, before we were told by the check-in lady that our tickets were standby tickets, despite assurances from the day before that they were not. Needless to say, the plane was sufficiently overbooked that we did not have seats. When we tried to get tickets for the next day, the women said that because massive number of people leaving Paris because of the end of the Tour de France, there were no tickets to any U.S. city for a week. There were also no flights to Europe, or any place where we could find a connection to the U.S.

    After this, we called our travel agent, who within twenty minutes booked us on a flight to Amsterdam, and then a connection from Amsterdam to Seattle. All that remained was to pick up the tickets on the other side of the airport. However, someone had left unattended baggage in the middle of he route to pick up the tickets. She was given vague instructions of an alternate route to pick up the tickets. After thirty minutes of searching, my wife finally found the route, we got the tickets, and the next day returned to Seattle.

    Hopefully that’s good enough to win the backpack :)

  • http://superdumbsupervillain.blogspot.com/ superdumb

    When I was in college, I went to a music conference in NYC. I bummed a ride from some friend’s band to Philadelphia, thinking it would get me closer to Boston. Umm, not so much.

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  • arvindr

    Hi,

    I was traveling back from Madras to Washington DC. This was the return part of my trip. So I had assumed that you really did not have to confirm with the airlines. Due to the way I had booked my trip, I was to travel from Madras to Bombay, change planes and travel from there to Delhi, another change of plane, fly to London and from there to Washington DC. My flight from Madras to Bombay went of fine with no issues. I land at Bombay and was told that all flights to Delhi were delayed due to fog problems at Delhi. Then to my surprise I was told that since I had not confirmed my ticket, my ongoing flights were not booked.

    I spent most of the day in the Bombay airport trying to get on a flight to Delhi. Finally late afternoon, I managed to catch a flight to Delhi. Now I had the same problem in Delhi. They did not have me booked to London and onto DC. I was booked on a codeshare flight so that meant I had to spend all of my evening and most of the night trying to convince two sets of airline folk that they had to help me get on a flight to Washington DC. Finally around 12AM, they agreed to get me on a flight to DC. Now it was too late to go anywhere out to sleep, so I ended up spending the night trying to sleep in the airport on a hard uncomfortable chair.

    The next day again all flights were delayed due to fog. Now due to this, another person who was on that flight and me realized that we would miss our connecting flight to DC. So we asked the airline folks what were our options. They said they would route the two of us onto a flight to New York and from NY we would be on a flight to DC. So now we agreed to this option. Now we got to London and made it to the NY flight. However something went wrong and we were delayed in taking off by a couple of hours. The reason we learnt later was that they had problems loading luggage onto it.

    So now we arrive in NY about two hours late and learn that we missed the last flight out to DC. So we would have to be put in a hotel and then take a flight out the next day. I was relieved that I would at least get to sleep in a nice bed. But then when I went to collect my baggage, I found that of my two checked in baggage, only one was available. It turned out that due to a routing mistake at London, my friend’s and one of my baggage had been routed off to DC. So now we had to collect them at DC. We had to wait for a while to get to the hotel and it was rather late (around 3PM or so) before I got back to sleep.

    Next day my friend and I came to the airport early only to learn we were booked on an afternoon flight to DC. We spent the morning in the airport. When we board our flight when I was told that my carry-on was to large and so had to be checked in. Finally we arrive at DC. I find my checked in carry on had arrived but my other checked in baggage was on a later flight. The baggage that was misrouted arrived on the flight from London about 3 hours later. So I spent another four hours in the airport. My friend was able to convince kind customs official to retrieve our luggage for us.

    So finally I arrived home about 24 hours later than I was supposed, having spent countless hours in 5 airports alongwith 2 nights.

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  • dbng

    I’ve had airline personnel provide a rush escort through security/passport/etc in order to make connections in Chicago, London and Frankfurt and last month I had to spend 24 hours in Philadelphia because I missed my overseas connection by 5 minutes.

    But none of that compares to losing my passport at the airport in Delhi. What a mess….

  • andrew_lee

    I was going to a workshop in Snowmass, CO, during the World Cup. I had warned the shuttle company about the game near my home the day I was leaving, and suggested which routes to avoid, which they ignored, so they picked me up over an hour late. I didn’t miss the flight, because a bird had been sucked into the engine when the plane arrived, so the flight was cancelled. However, because of another World Cup game in Denver, it was almost impossible to get a new flight to Snowmass before the workshop started. The airline ended up flying us to Salt Lake City, first class, and putting us in a hotel overnight so we could catch a 6 AM flight to Denver, and then on to Snowmass.

  • mcsouth

    As much as I travel, I have plenty of stories to choose from; the time I arrived at home airport at midnight after numerous flight delays, and then had to drive 2 hours out of my way to get around all the flooded and washed out bridges? the time I was stranded in Paris due to Air France rolling strikes? Running flat out from one end of Washington Dulles to the other to make a trans-atlantic flight (and then sitting in a seat all sweaty for a seven hour flight – ugh)?

    The worst clearly had to be a simple little trip from Harrisburg, PA through Detroit to Kansas City, though. Left Saturday morning, arrived in Detroit (I thought far enough ahead of approaching winter storm), boarded flight to Kansas City on time….sat at the gate for two hours, then taxied out to de-icing station at end of runway….and sat for five hours until captain announced that flight was cancelled…and then sat for another 3 hours until our plane was actually able to make it back to the terminal. We boarded at noon, got off the plane shortly after 10 pm…and never went anywhere. Sleep on the floor (all chairs full) that night, using laptop bag as pillow. Stand in line all next day for flights that were ultimately cancelled. Finally caught a flight to Minneapolis at midnight Sunday night, arrived at 3am, and slept on the floor (again) for a few hours before standing in line to fly stand-by to Kansas City. I finally managed to catch the third flight that day to Kansas City. So…left Saturday morning, arrived Monday afternoon.

    I’m standing in line at the Hertz rental center, look up…and see a co-worker in line ahead…who left Harrisburg that Monday morning…and beat me to KC.

    My luggage…oh yeah, my luggage…arrived later that week – I think about Wednesday or Thursday. At least I was smart enough to pack a toothbrush in my laptop bag….

  • jparris1

    During bad weather on a trip from Tuscon to Memphis we were trapped in the Dallas airport for hours. It was like a cattle pen. One giant room packed cheek to jowl with people. Once planes starting leaving everyone cheered wildly for each departing group, so at least there was some camaraderie.

  • http://mike.karrmedia.com mikekarr

    Years ago I was going to school in Flagstaff, AZ and was going back to Champaign, Illinois to visit my future wife over my Christmas break. A friend and I were going to caravan to Phoenix as his girlfriend lived in the area and I needed to get to the airport. It was snowing heavily, more heavily than I’d ever seen when we’d left Flagstaff, so we left about six hours before my flight, driving away around 3 am.

    Maybe half an hour later we’re cruising down the highway at about 30 mph, I’m following my friend, me in my Ford Ranger and he in his girlfriends Geo Metro. He decides to speed up a bit to 35 mph; this makes me nervous since my truck doesn’t do so well in the snow. Five minutes later the back end of my truck loosens up and spins me around so that I’m now facing the headlights of the semi that was following me. I keep going though and see the tail end of the Metro before spinning a couple more times and then off the side of the highway into a snow bank.

    My friend sees all of this and think I’m a goner for sure, but as I rest in the snow bank he pulls off and we spend about half an hour digging out and then hit the road again, this time a respectable 30 until we hit the snow line. We make it down to the airport just half an hour before my flight, before 9/11 this was generally frowned upon, but doable. The lines are so long though, that it takes ten minutes before I can talk to anyone, so when I finally reach a person the y tell me that I’m too late and they gave my seats away. I’m assured though, that there’s another flight out later to Detroit and then on to Champaign. The flight to Detroit is delayed, but the gate crew tell me that the Champaign flight is delayed too so I should make it still.

    I fly out to Detroit, and arrive around 10 pm. I visit the gate crew and am told that the flight to Champaign left hours ago and the next one would leave the following afternoon. I’m stunned and have nowhere to go, and barely enough money for a hotel. I happened to work for Budget Rent-a Car washing cars to pay for school, and one of the perks at the time were cheap rentals, so I find the Budget desk just as they were closing up and ask if they have anything I can drop off somewhere around Champaign. They have a car I can take, but they tell me the closest drop off will be in Chicago, two hours and a half hours from Champaign.

    I’m ready to throw in the towel and go sleep on the floor of the airport, but I remember that Budget had just bought another agency small agency the week prior, so I ask if I could drop the car off there instead if there happened to be a location in the area. They really want to help me out, so $20 later I’m in a car headed from Detroit to Champaign. Six hours of highway driving later and some 27 hours into this travel nightmare I’m passed out at my future wife’s apartment.

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  • dysong

    August 1981. I was flyinng out of Frankfurt to Charleston, SC, then on to Austin, TX. We were supposed to leave at noon and, as the rules were at the time, we went into a “passengers only area” at 10:00pm. There are no concessions in this area and to restrooms. At 3:00pm they announce that there is a delay due to the controlers strike in the US. New departure time is 5:00pm. Around 9:00 they announce that there is a crack in one of the engine firewalls and that we will not be leaving tonight. But not to worry as they have made arrangements at a local hotel for us, and busses will be there shortly. The busses never showed, but we did bard the plane at 11:30 and leave. Flew all the way to Dover, DE. We landed about 2:00am Eastern and taxied to the end of the runway. The flight crew opened the doors, but we were not allowed to get off the plane. After about 30 minutes,they closed up and we were off again. Arrived in Charleston a few hours later and had to find a hotel. It took another day to re-route to Austin. Best part of the story, I was 18 returning to the US alone while my family was still living in Germany.

  • nathaniel the greatest

    My most interesting travel story involves a couple vegetables, a sheep, and about another 2 years on the statute of limitations.

    But my worst travel story involved being stuck in a greyhound terminal for 19 hours.

  • payne

    Outside with a lot of cold, the train station just decides to stop because the employees had some stuff to deal with the employers. 8 hours almost!

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  • MiKeN

    I would have to say that my worst time dealing with the airport was going to visit some relatives and coming back home and having the airport “lose” the luggage. It was not fun dealing with getting it back but we did none the less.

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