The Fundamental Traveller's Timepieces

What is a travel watch or timepiece? Traditionally, it was the pocket watch as it was designed to be portable.More recently, however, the travel watch has become a more ambiguous category of watches that serve travellers with a range of needs, both functional and fashionable.

When it comes to categorising watches, we tend to organise them by the strict purposes their styles were originally meant for. That translates into a world of dive watches, pilot watches, racing watches, formal watches, business watches, etc... A category that only loosely exists in the traditional sense, but that is nevertheless extremely important, is ‘travel watches’. What is a travel watch? Well, traditionally, a pocket watch was the original travel watch because it was designed to be portable. More recently, the travel watch has become a more ambiguous category of watches that serve travellers with a range of needs, both functional and fashionable. The question we seek to answer in this article is “what are the elements of a good watch to wear while travelling?”. Of course, the answer depends on where you are going, but you’ll see a lot of commonalities between these watches despite there being many different types of timepieces that would nevertheless be good to travel with. You’ll also find a lot of watches that advertise themselves as being ‘ideal for travelling’ that we don’t include here. Why not include every potential type of travel watch in this list? When it comes down to it, we are rather demanding when it comes to what our travel watches should do, and how various things like the fragility (or complexity) of a movement balances out a watch’s overall design and utility.

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