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Adam Nebbs
Adam Nebbs

Travellers' Checks | Smart seatback organisers let you bypass germ-ridden plane pockets

Walter + Ray accessories come in wallet, purse and carry-on sizes

; also in travel news, deals to Kota Kinabalu and Mandarin hotels, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Brazilian adventure revisited

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The TAB Seatback Organizer from Walter + Ray.
Adam Nebbs

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“My least favorite job at the airport was cleaning out the seatback pockets each night,” writes airport-worker-turned-English-professor Christopher Schaberg, in his humorously offbeat and philosophical book The End of Airports (2015). “Good seatback pockets might house a folded magazine, a gum wrapper, or the crumpled stub of a boarding pass. Bad seatback pockets would contain actual gum, puddles of Pepsi [...] gobs of snot caked on indecipherable other matter, or the razor edge of an uncrumpled boarding pass.”

Walter + Ray’s seatback organiser attaches to the seat pocket in a number of ways.
Walter + Ray’s seatback organiser attaches to the seat pocket in a number of ways.
Helping passengers to avoid delving into these disagreeable, germ-ridden crevices is Tania Rodrigues, whose Los Angeles-based company Walter + Ray has been selling a growing line of smart seatback organisers since 2015. Sized between a wallet or purse and a regular carry-on bag, they are designed to attach to the seat in front of you in a number of ways – or to just slip into the seat pocket itself in the event that it’s clean enough – while comfortably containing all your inflight requisites. A demonstration video can be found at walterandray.com, along with the full range of organisers and other accessories.
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BRAZILIAN ADVENTURE Theodore Roosevelt was in his mid-50s, with two terms as president of the United States (1901-1909) behind him, when, in February 1914, he and his son Kermit set off with a party of 20 others along Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida (“River of Doubt”), now renamed Rio Roosevelt, in seven dugout canoes.

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