The trick is to have your laundry done every four or five days and to only bring one suit. I know that might sound like a bad idea, but that's how one packs light.

Hopefully most of your meetings aren't with the same people every day, so it's likely no one will notice. Do your best to keep your suit clean and have it dry cleaned whenever necessary. Pants tend to take up a lot of room when you have a lot of them, so do your best to only pack a few and repeat them much as possible. It's always better to underpack than overpack. Worst case scenario is you can purchase what you forgot or thought you didn't need.

Another great tip is those travel vacuum bags that you can find at most discount stores. They suck all of the air out of your clothes and compress them down to practically nothing. Unfortunately, they make your clothing very wrinkled, so be sure you have access to an iron at your hotel.

I hate the vacuum bags for dress items because of the wrinkles. I've had more success by rolling my clothes as if they were going into a tube. For some reason that seems to save space. Although, I haven't figured out why that is. Maybe it just helps fill out the corners of the suitcase better.

Another good tip is to wear your sport coat on the plane on top of a casual outfit. It's a better look for getting upgrades.

You should tell us first where you go and when ... it's not the same to give ideas for Spain in summer than for Finland in winter .....

I love the eBags Packing Cubes. I find that they do a great job at letting you pack a lot of clothes and keep them in wearable condition. You can buy a 3-piece set for around $25 either directly from their site, or from Amazon.

They are just thin suitcases that fit inside of your normal suitcase, but they help you compress and organize your clothes without wrinkling them like the vacuum packs do. Once all of your clothes are in place you'll have plenty of extra room in your suitcase for raincoats or shoes, etc.

They also have small handles so if you really want to pack light or take them as a carry on, you don't even need a suitcase. They are also very appealing and smart looking. I highly recommend them.

Whatever you end up doing, you should only checking one bag. Not only will you be traveling lighter, but you'll avoid the new surcharges on checking more than one bag that many airlines are now charging to offset the higher fuel costs.

I usually travel with too many books, so my recent acquisition of a Kindle really lightened the load.

Unfortunately, there aren't a wide variety of books available yet, but I still manage. Additionally, you can read newspapers (like the Wall Street Journal) and a few magazines. You can send your own documents to it, so it's good for reading work reports, etc.

It's a bit of a burden in that it's just another device you need to charge, but the battery life is long.

It's perfect for reading in long, slow moving security lines -- much less cumbersome than a book.

My wife and I will be leaving on a trip to Europe next week and we will be in France and Portugal for a total of twenty-two days. My wife is not a big believer in "packing light" since she'd like to be able to wear something different in each of the various places we'll be travelling to. (She also likes me to follow her lead in this regard.) Considering the length of the trip, that adds up to a lot of luggage. However, over the years, we've planned some of our vacations in such a way that we can pack relatively lightly for at least a portion of our travels. For example, this trip, we are going to be flying directly to Paris and checking in at the Hotel Meurice. After staying at the Meurice for the better part of a week, we will check out. However, we will be leaving a good deal of our baggage at the Meurice and taking less than half of our clothes with us for a week-long barge trip down the French canal system, through the Burgundy region. We then will return to the Meurice for a few more wonderful days in Paris, at which time we will simply reclaim the bags that we had left behind. Then, we'll continue on to Lisbon for the remainder of our trip.

There is no way that we would be able to accomodate all of our clothing and other items in the relatively small confines of the stateroom that we have on the barge. But, using this approach and returning to the same hotel after a portion of our journey is over provides us with the much-appreciated opportunity to lighten our load during that time and still be able to have access to the more formal attire that we would want to have at our disposal later on, when we are in Lisbon!

NPR had a segment on "How to Pack Everything You Own in One Bag" a few days ago. Read the article on their website and you'll see that rolling clothes, as resilin suggests, is not the most efficient way to use space in a suitcase. It turns out that "bundle wrapping" your clothes into small packages, where some clothes wrap around other clothing, is the most efficient approach that doesn't wrinkle your clothes. See the diagram in the article for an example of bundle wrapping. I think I'll have to give it a try!

OneBag.com, which was mentioned in the segment, is a very popular site dedicated to the 'art and science of travelling light.' Not only does OneBag cover the ins and outs of bundle wrapping, it also goes into the finer details of sticking to a list that doesn't include packing things that you might need on your trip.

See for yourself. http://onebag.com

The suggestion I am about to make here is one that I have yet to successfully implement myself. That is: try to minimize the amount of toiletries that you bring with you.

When my wife and I travel, especially internationally, we always stay in five star hotels that provide each of their guests with ample supplies of shampoos, hair conditioners, bath gels, soap, etc. from some of the world's most famous brands: Hermes, Bulgari, Remede, Molton Brown and Quercus, just to name a few. However, she still insists on bringing relatively large quantities of the special shampoos, hair conditioners and soaps that she uses back in the USA, explaining that she is used to using these products and doesn't want to change her habits. (I'm always quite satisfied with what the hotels are providing and never bring such items with me.) I've told my wife countless times that these things are quite heavy and that they're adding considerable weight to our baggage, but she won't listen. (We've had to pay extra fees to the airlines in this regard a number of times.) I thought there was some light at the end of the tunnel when the airport security checks starting limiting the amount of liquids you could put in your carry-ons, but she simply packed these items away in our checked luggage when we flew.

To make matters worse, rather than leave the unused complimentary designer-brand toiletries that the hotels that we stay in provide on a daily basis in our room, for the next guests to use, she will frequently pack them away to bring with us, to use as gifts when we get back home, thereby making our luggage even heavier!

I'm sure I'm not the only husband being confronted with this situation....... Women! You can't live without 'em, but it sure is tempting!

If a friend of mine returned from a five-star hotel in a wonderful destination, I'd be pretty disappointed if all they gave me was a "gift" of some unused toiletries from their hotel.

Tell your spouse that switching your shampoos is actually healthy for her hair. It helps avoid product buildup of the same compounds and chemicals that might be found in her favorite shampoos.

On a side note... While I wouldn't expect a husband to know this, Quercus isn't a brand. Quercus is an "oak" fragrance — most notably from the world famous Penhaligon's of London ("Quercus" is literally the scientific genus name for 'oak'). It would be like saying "chocolate" is a brand of Baskin Robbins.

One thing that I do on my trips is bring a variety of older items with me and wear them one last time before I part company with them. I may strategically bring 4 pairs of shoes but only come home with one pair. Or go with 5 scarves but come home with none. While this isn't helpful at the beginning of the trip, each day I'm lighter and lighter as my "last hurrah" with each article of clothing gets left in the hotel before I move on to my next destination. That way, I"m not carrying around much dirty laundry. Don't get me wrong, not everything is getting thrown out but I have beautiful things that have seen better days, as we all do, and who knows, someone may find my discarded silk blouse and think it still has life in it. One mans junk is another mans treasure. Once I even left an old suitcase in a hotel room as my discarded items meant the one good suitcase I had left was enough for the remainder of my things.