An Interview with Alissa Bell, Creator of BikepackBaggregator.com
The home page of bikepackbaggregator.com.
Alissa Bell is a longtime adventure cyclist and software developer with a habit of making excellent bikepacking websites.
She’s the creator of exploringwild.com, one of my favorite sources for bikepacking and backpacking content. She also made bikesleepbike.com, a comprehensive directory of bike travel posts.
In 2025, Alissa launched her most recent creation: bikepackbaggregator.com. It’s a community-sourced gear directory and database that helps bikepackers create the perfect (or perfectly imperfect!) adventure setup.
Alissa has a special genius for websites that are thoughtful, useful, and impeccably organized. Bikepackbaggregator.com is a true Alissa Bell original.
Read more about her story in our interview below.
Alissa Bell bikepacking in Morocco.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience with bike travel.
I fell hard for bike travel about eight years ago. At first it was road touring as a way to experience new parts of the world (Southeast Asia, Patagonia, northern Africa, among others). More recently I’ve moved into off-road bikepacking and spent more time riding in remote parts of the western USA. In total I’ve ridden over 20,000 loaded miles, at least half of that solo, and though the details keep evolving bikes are still my favorite way to adventure.
In a past life, before discovering my love of travel and the outdoors, I worked in the software industry. I love the challenge of building software products that help people do things they enjoy. So I pair my love of outdoor adventure with a bad habit of spending too much time at my computer when I’m home, building websites like this one.
What is BikepackBaggregator and what does it do?
BikepackBaggregator.com is a place for bikepackers to discover, research, and share their experience with bikepacking gear. It’s part gear directory, part shopping tool, part community knowledge-sharing platform.
Bikepacking is a gear-intensive sport and the options can be hard to navigate. Bags and racks often have very specialized features and can be quite expensive. I see newbies get overwhelmed and stuck in a gear choosing rut before they have much actual bikepacking experience, leading to frustration and wasted money. Even experienced folks may know what they need but struggle to find it, because there’s no single organized directory gathering small gear makers alongside bigger brands (until now!).
Baggregator has two main parts:
Gear directory: Baggregator collects details about bikepacking bags and racks from all around the world into an organized, searchable product directory with user-friendly search and sort tools. A simple example is that you can sort any product category, for example seatbags, by price or by capacity (and lots of other things).
Community setups database: This is where any bikepacker can share their real-world bikepacking setup and what they like or dislike about their bike and gear. These setups can be browsed for inspiration, searched for specific bikes or products or routes, or read on a product page to learn what other riders think of a certain piece of gear.
BikepackBaggregator.com is a place for bikepackers to discover, research, and share their experience with bikepacking gear. It’s part gear directory, part shopping tool, part community knowledge-sharing platform.
What’s with the name?
Bag + Aggregator = Baggregator. A big part of the site’s vision is about gathering, or aggregating, bikepacking bags from various corners of the internet into one easy-to-navigate platform. It’s kind of a mouthful to say out loud, but it’s unique and I think it’s memorable once you get the word play.
Who is the website for?
It’s for anyone who bikepacks, or wants to bikepack.
Beginners might browse through the setup collection with the goal of “Let’s see what bikepacking looks like for other people, and how they arrange gear on their bikes for different riding styles.” They might use price sorting in the gear directory to find bags on the more affordable end, or maybe capacity sorting to find bags with lots of space or small bags that will help them pack light.
More experienced riders can look for something specific, like a small seat bag that’s compatible with a dropper seatpost, or handlebar cradle with a rigid mount for rough trails, or even panniers that come in fun colors (yes there’s a color search option!). You can look for handmade gear, or gear made in a specific country or US state, if you want to support your local shops. You can even look for a specific bike, like the Salsa Fargo, and see how other people are setting it up for bikepacking.
As a woman who rides a small bike, I’m personally hoping to make the site really useful to other shorter cyclists. Our cargo space is constrained by small frame triangles and limited clearance for bags above our tires. That’s why the setups directory includes fields for rider height and bike size, so we short riders can learn from each other about the gear that works best on small bikes.
“You can look for handmade gear, or gear made in a specific country or US state, if you want to support your local shops.”
What kind of setups are you looking for in the community setups database?
All of them! Seriously. People sometimes assume “You don’t want MY setup. My setup is funky and mismatched and sometimes a little droopy. I’ll let people with the spiffy streamlined setups share theirs instead.”
But that’s exactly the point. I want ALL kinds of setups, including fancy ones, but especially realistic ones that aren’t Instagram-perfect. These types of setups don’t get much coverage in online content, but they’re what most of us are actually riding. I want Baggregator to represent the full range so all riders can benefit from shared knowledge and know that their experience is valuable to the bikepacking community.
Looking at the setups collection right now, I see everything from dialed race rigs to DIY baskets and bungees, and from long-haul rides to beginner overnighters. Though I originally wanted the site to focus on off-pavement riding, I’ve welcomed pavement-focused touring setups too. So we have everything from road and touring bikes to full-suspension mountain bikes… Anything and everything having to do with multiday adventures by bike.
So to the bikepacker reading this, your setup is the kind of setup I want. I hope you’ll share it here.
Bikepackbaggregator.com wants to see your bike setup!
This sounds kind of like the “Rigs of” series on bikepacking.com. Is it similar?
Several people have made this comparison when I showed them the site. It seems like people find bikepacking.com’s Rigs of (Race Name) series really interesting and helpful, especially if they’re planning a ride on the same route.
Baggregator offers the same type of helpful information about bikes and bags/racks, but with two big differences:
Not limited to high-profile races, or races at all. Most of us need more than an emergency bivvy in our sleep kit! Baggregator represents the full range of setups including many gear combinations you won’t find on bikepacking.com.
The setups in the Rigs Of series live in long text-filled articles that are hard to navigate if you’re looking for something specific. Baggregator’s setups are organized and searchable in many practical ways: by bike type or even specific model, route, terrain type, even tags like DIY or budget-friendly.
In short, Baggregator is an everyperson’s “rigs of everything” database that is well organized and easily searchable.
Bikepackbaggregator.com is designed to be well-organized and searchable.
How is this site different from an AI-generated summary, like what you might find at the top of Google search results when you ask a gear question?
AI is quickly changing the way we interact with the internet, and as a website builder I’m more familiar with this topic than I’d like to be. AI summaries are generally bad news for website creators, whose content is used to train models that regurgitate our work instead of sending visitors to our websites.
AI answers are convenient, but I believe they’re not what most people want when choosing bikepacking gear. In my experience, current AI models don’t understand the nuances of our niche activity. They make mistakes but sound so confident that you wouldn’t guess they’re wrong. And they have the same limitation that all search engines do, which is that bigger companies with more marketing budget are more likely to be mentioned than small brands making equally great gear.
AI also can’t scratch that innate human itch to learn from and share with other humans. Bikepacking is, at its heart, such a human activity! I think most bikepackers want to learn from other bikepackers, not AI models trained to sound like them.
All the content on BikepackBaggregator comes from humans. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit entering specs and features into spreadsheets, making sure every detail of the gear directory is correct. The setups database is filled with field-tested entries from real bikepackers around the world who want to help other riders have a good time out there. Bikepackers on the whole are welcoming and generous, and I like to think of the crowdsourced setups collection as an online version of our weird and wonderful community.
Alissa Bell in the wild! All the content on Bikepackbaggregator.com comes from humans.
How can interested bikepackers participate and help?
1) Add your bikepacking setup(s) to the community database!
2) Sign up for an account to create a profile, keep track of your setups and reviews, build a gear wishlist and have list, and subscribe to Baggregator update emails with setup inspiration and newly added gear.
3) Give the Instagram account @bikepackbaggregator a follow for setup inspiration and project updates.
Alissa Bell bikepacking in Kyrgyzstan.
