The "tugo" is a cup holder designed to hang between the poles of your luggage case as you pull it along behind you while on vacation. It can hold a nice cup of coffee for you as you pull the suitcase with one hand and talk on the phone with the other, all the while racing to the plane that you're about to miss. It gives you an extra bit of flexibility to do everything you need to do while traveling.

Well, of course that's what I thought before I put it on my own luggage to give it a try.

The tugo, made of a sturdy rubber-like material, doesn't sit quite right between the rods of the handle. I tightened everything up to keep it from sliding down the sticks, but it hung awkwardly and didn't seem as though it fit quite right. It still did the job of firmly holding a cup of coffee, or the like, though and didn't move. But, this is where I found the problem.

I'm not necessarily a coffee drinker. I'd rather have a soda, bottle of water or some juice. When I tried to place one of those in the tugo, it wouldn't fit. A can of soda would fall right through and a regular bottle would take some maniuplation to get it in and out. So, something that should be a time and hand saver actually ends up being more of a pain in the butt.

That whole idea of being in a hurry is squashed too as it does not collapse down when you put the handle down, ready to store it in the overhead bin. Instead the tugo must be removed, to be put somewhere else, and take up space that you might not have in another case. Of course that's not exactly practical if you're in a hurry and only have so many hands to do things.

Plainly enough, that defeats the purpose of what the tugo seems to be all about - convenience.

After running these tests I decided to check their photos on flickr, which I'm using here in this post per their news release, to see if I was missing something and maybe using the tugo wrong. As it turns out I was, but not in the matter of how I fixed it to my suitcase or used it with a drink. I was silly enough not to use it while relaxing by the river and doing a bit of fishing!

The tugo, in principal, is a good travel accessory, but not something that is terribly practical - especially if you're in a hurry. Having an item like this already built in to a suitcase though would be ideal, particularly if it collapses down with the handle, but otherwise it just doesn't work how it needs to. The tugo is ideal for someone in a hurry trying to make their flight while having to use their free hand for something else, like the phone, but the time and even small bit of space it uses for storage just doesn't work for me personally as a water and soda drinker.