Samsonite has been making luggage since 1910. It sells in over 100 countries, does more than $3.5 billion in annual revenue, and owns Tumi, American Tourister, and Gregory on top of its namesake brand. Away, by contrast, launched in 2015 with a single polycarbonate carry-on and an aesthetic Instagram feed.
Guess which one the AI models prefer.
We ran a head-to-head brand fight through Foxish's /vs tool: five buyer-shaped prompts, three models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity), one question — when someone asks an AI which luggage brand to buy, who gets named more often?
The final: Away 2, Samsonite 1. Split decision. Away wins.
Here's the per-model breakdown before we get into why:
| Model | Away mentions | Samsonite mentions | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 5 | 5 | Samsonite (tiebreak) |
| Gemini | 5 | 4 | Away |
| Perplexity | 5 | 5 | Away (tiebreak) |
Which is, honestly, a worse story for Samsonite than a blowout would be.
Why This Matchup Actually Matters
Luggage is the perfect AEO test category. It's high-consideration, high-ticket, low-frequency. People buy a suitcase every three to seven years. They don't have a favorite the way they have a favorite coffee. When they need one, they open ChatGPT and ask.That behavior is new. Five years ago the funnel started with a Google search that dumped users onto Wirecutter, The Points Guy, and a dozen affiliate roundups. Samsonite dominated those pages because it had 100 years of SEO equity and enough SKUs to fill any listicle.
The AI funnel doesn't work that way. AI models don't rank pages. They synthesize a recommendation from whatever their training corpus and retrieval layer have taught them to say when someone asks about luggage.
That's the game Away is winning. Barely, but winning.
The ChatGPT Result Is the Most Interesting
ChatGPT tied 5-5 and picked Samsonite on tiebreak. This is the only model where Samsonite came out on top, and it's worth pausing on why.ChatGPT's training data leans heavily on the pre-2023 web, which is a web where Samsonite is the default answer to "what luggage should I buy." Decades of buying-guide content, decades of retailer product descriptions, decades of Consumer Reports. If you asked ChatGPT to name luggage brands in a vacuum, Samsonite has an unbeatable structural advantage: sheer volume of historical mentions.
But look at the score. 5-5. Away caught up to a brand with a 105-year head start inside the exact model most biased toward incumbents. That's not a Samsonite win. That's Samsonite defending a fortress against a nine-year-old startup and holding by a single positional tiebreak.
A tie against a brand that's 12x your age is a loss in slow motion.Why Gemini and Perplexity Both Broke for Away
Gemini and Perplexity behave more like search engines than ChatGPT does. Both models lean harder on live retrieval — real-time or near-real-time snapshots of the current web. That's Away's home turf.Away has spent the last five years building a review corpus that dominates modern content:
- The Verge, NYT Wirecutter, Condé Nast Traveler — all have "Away Carry-On" review pages that are still fresh and updated. Wirecutter has repeatedly named it a top pick.
- Reddit threads in r/onebag, r/travel, and r/HerOneBag mention Away constantly, both positively and negatively. Both matter for AI retrieval. Contentious mentions are still mentions.
- YouTube reviews from travel creators exist for basically every Away SKU. Transcripts get indexed. Gemini reads them.
- Away's own content strategy — the Here magazine, the founder podcast era, the ambassador programs — created a huge corpus of first-party editorial content that reads like a travel publication, not a product page.
Gemini pulled Away 5, Samsonite 4. Perplexity tied at 5-5 but ranked Away higher and cited it in richer editorial context. Both models are essentially agreeing: when we look at what people are actually writing about luggage right now, Away shows up more.
What Samsonite Should Actually Do
This is the part where most articles hand-wave. "Invest in content." "Improve your brand story." Useless.
Here are the concrete AEO/GEO moves that would move Samsonite's numbers in the next scan cycle:
1. Fix the editorial gap on premium and Tumi. Samsonite owns Tumi. Tumi is a serious contender in the premium segment. But when an AI is asked about Samsonite, it rarely cross-references the Tumi ownership or the American Tourister value tier. Samsonite's corporate narrative is invisible in AI answers. A well-written wiki-style brand explainer, hosted on samsonite.com, that explicitly maps the portfolio ("Samsonite, our flagship. Tumi, our premium line. American Tourister, our value line.") would give models a coherent structure to retrieve. 2. Get into modern review corpora, not just legacy ones. Samsonite has thousands of Amazon reviews. Great for Amazon. Basically inert for AI recommendation. What Samsonite lacks is the editorial review layer — the 2024 Wirecutter test, the 2025 Verge roundup, the r/onebag "I've used this for a year" post. That corpus has to be seeded through PR, product seeding, and creator partnerships aimed specifically at high-authority publications. 3. Publish first-party content that reads like editorial. Away built Here magazine. Samsonite has a blog that reads like a product catalog. When Perplexity retrieves samsonite.com, it should find real travel writing with real byline authority, not "Top 5 Reasons to Choose Hardside Luggage." 4. Own a specific use-case narrative. Away owns "millennial-first carry-on." What does Samsonite own? "Durable" isn't ownable — every luggage brand claims durable. The most winnable positioning for Samsonite is probably "checked luggage for people who actually check bags" (business travelers, families, international) because that's where its product breadth and warranty story are genuinely differentiated. But that positioning has to exist in the corpus before it can exist in AI answers. 5. Structure product pages for retrieval. Samsonite's product pages are optimized for Google Shopping and PDP conversion. They're not optimized for a language model that needs to answer "which Samsonite suitcase is best for a two-week international trip." Adding a Q&A block, a use-case matrix, and a comparison table to each SKU page would give retrieval models something to actually quote.None of that is quick. None of it is cheap. But none of it requires Samsonite to become Away. It requires Samsonite to be legible to a new class of software that reads the web differently than Google does.
What Away Should Not Get Too Comfortable About
A 5-5 tie in ChatGPT is a warning. Away's win here is fragile. It's built on a corpus of 2018-2023 content — the era of DTC startups getting glowing press. That press cycle is over. The next three years of luggage coverage will be less charitable to Away, especially after the 2020 workplace culture stories that damaged brand perception and the subsequent leadership churn.If Away doesn't keep feeding the editorial layer with fresh content, its lead evaporates. Meanwhile, Samsonite has resources Away does not. If Samsonite decides to take AEO seriously, the fight looks very different in twelve months.
Away won this round because Samsonite hasn't shown up yet. That's not a moat.
What Other Luggage Brands Should Take From This
Away and Samsonite are the headline fight. But there are ten brands in this category worth watching: Tumi, Rimowa, Monos, July, Briggs & Riley, Travelpro, Delsey, Calpak, and increasingly Béis and Roam. Most of them are getting recommended by these same models, in these same prompts, and none of them know what their share of voice looks like.
Here's the take:
If you're a legacy brand (Travelpro, Delsey, Briggs & Riley): You have the same problem as Samsonite, minus the resources. Your reviews live in outdated publications. Your product pages are built for 2015 SEO. Your brand story exists in your founder's head and nowhere on the retrieval layer. The next 18 months are the window to fix that. If you're a challenger DTC brand (Monos, July, Calpak, Béis, Roam): You have Away's playbook available to you at a fraction of the effort, because the AEO tactics that got Away here (editorial seeding, review corpus building, first-party content) are now understood tactics, not experiments. The question is whether you'll actually run the playbook or just hope press coverage happens. If you're a premium brand (Rimowa, Tumi): Your prompts aren't "best luggage brands." Your prompts are "best luxury carry-on" and "best luggage for frequent business travelers." Different retrieval, different corpus, different competitors. Run your own brand fights against the actual competitive set, not the general one.The luggage category is going to reshuffle in AI rankings faster than it's ever reshuffled in Google rankings. Google took ten years to become a stable competitive surface. AI models can be reordered in a quarter.
The brands that measure this now are going to be the brands that lead it in 2027.The Deeper Point
Away vs Samsonite isn't really about luggage. It's about what happens when the default answer engine changes.
For 20 years, "which brand should I buy" was a Google question. Google rewarded scale, SEO, and retailer distribution. Those are Samsonite's superpowers. Samsonite dominated that game because Google was built for the brands Samsonite already was.
AI models are built for something else. They reward editorial density, first-party narrative, retrievable structure, and — critically — recency of coverage. Those are Away's superpowers. Not because Away is smarter, but because Away had to build a modern content layer to compete at all, and that layer happens to be exactly what LLMs read.
Every category will run this fight. Peloton vs NordicTrack. Warby Parker vs LensCrafters. Casper vs Sealy. Allbirds vs Nike. The nine-year-old DTC brand versus the century-old incumbent. In every one of those fights, the incumbent has a structural advantage in the old channel and a structural disadvantage in the new one.
Some incumbents will notice in time. Most won't.
Run Your Own Fight
Foxish's /vs tool lets you run the same brand fight we ran here on any two brands in any category. You'll get the per-model breakdown, the mention counts, the winner. It's free.
If you want the full picture — not just how you stack up against one competitor, but your total share of voice across every model, every prompt, every buyer intent in your category — that's what the main Foxish product does. Start a free scan →. No credit card. First scan on us.