Yes, you can take watches in your hand luggage — and you always should. Watches go through airport security without any special procedure, they should never travel in the hold, and your own watches are personal effects with nothing to declare at customs. Here is what you need to know before flying with two or three watches, without the drama.
Going through airport security with watches
A watch passes through the scanner without any problem. Steel-cased models sometimes set off the metal detector, which leads to a manual check lasting a few seconds — nothing more.
Watches packed in your hand luggage go through the X-ray machine like everything else. Unlike laptops, there is no need to take them out. If an officer asks you to open your case, they look, they hand it back, and you move on.
The only useful advice: do not drop your watches loose into the tray with your keys and coins. That is where scratches happen, and it is also where things get left behind.
Hand luggage or hold: the only real decision
Hand luggage, always. Three reasons, in order of importance.
Baggage insurance almost always excludes valuables. Read the terms of your bank card or travel insurance: jewellery, watches and electronic equipment usually appear on the list of exclusions. If a checked bag is lost, you will not be compensated.
The hold is a brutal environment. Bags are stacked, thrown onto belts and crushed under other suitcases. A rigid case can take a lot, but it is not designed for that.
Bags get lost. Rarely, but often enough for the question to matter. A suitcase that goes missing for three days is nothing. The same suitcase with three watches inside is another matter.
Customs: when it starts to matter
There are two situations to distinguish.
You are travelling with your own watches. You take them and you bring them back: there is nothing to declare, they are personal effects. If you are wearing a piece of significant value and travelling across a customs border, keeping a photo of the receipt on your phone avoids any discussion on the way back — it proves the watch was not just bought abroad.
You buy a watch while travelling. Here, duty-free allowances apply when you return home, with thresholds that depend on the country you are entering (and, in the European Union, on how you travel). These thresholds change: check the official customs website of your home country before you leave rather than relying on a figure read somewhere.
How many to take, and how to pack them
For a one-week trip, two watches are enough in almost every case: the one you wear and an alternative for a different setting. Beyond that, you are packing things you will not take out.
The real risk when travelling is not breakage, it is contact. Two cases rubbing against each other in a bag pocket will scratch within a few hours of travel. That is exactly what a watch travel case with separate compartments solves: each watch is isolated from its neighbour, and the strap wraps around without being folded.
For two or three pieces, a compact format is enough. For four or more, look at models with six or eight slots — the Traversée travel case comes in versions for two to eight watches.
Should you take a watch winder?
No, except in particular cases.
An automatic watch worn every day winds itself. On a one-week trip, the second watch may stop: you will reset it in ten seconds when you get back.
A winder becomes relevant for a long stay, or for a watch with complications — perpetual calendar, moon phases — that is tedious to reset. Only then does a compact one- or two-watch model justify its place in a suitcase. Our watch winders include these formats. And if the watch you travel with has a date, read when not to change the date on an automatic watch before resetting it in a new time zone.