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The Pacsafe Daysafe passport wallet is a slim RFID blocking travel wallet with 8 card slots, a passport pocket, a full-length zip and a weight of 80 g (0.17 lb), and it is the wallet I carried through Hong Kong and Australia. Pacsafe has since dropped the Daysafe name, and the wallet that now does the same job is the Pacsafe RFIDsafe travel wallet at $89.95 (about €85, £67).
I switched to it because cards had started falling out of the Dynomighty wallet I had used for years, which had no zip and no RFID shielding. Pacsafe sent me the Daysafe to review, and by then I had already carried a Pacsafe anti-theft handbag long enough to know the fabric holds up. Below are the wallet’s measurements, how it handled a month of daily use and a long trip, the one drawback I found, and what to buy now.
Pacsafe Daysafe passport wallet specifications
The Daysafe passport wallet measures 16 x 11 x 2 cm (6.3 x 4.3 x 0.8 in) and weighs 80 g (0.17 lb) empty. Its full specification is in the table below.
| Specification | Pacsafe Daysafe passport wallet |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 16 x 11 x 2 cm (6.3 x 4.3 x 0.8 in) |
| Weight | 80 g (0.17 lb) |
| Card slots | 8 |
| Passport pocket | 1 |
| Closure | zip around the full perimeter |
| RFID shielding | whole wallet, blocking 10 MHz to 3 GHz |
| Material | polyester |
| Colours | black, or navy with a polka dot |
The height is the number to check against your own pockets. At 16 cm the Daysafe is taller than a standard bifold, which is what lets banknotes lie flat and what stops the wallet slipping into a jeans pocket.
What RFID blocking does, and what it does not
RFID blocking stops a scanner reading your contactless cards through the wallet, and nothing else. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the same technology that lets you pay by tapping: the card answers a reader over a short radio link. The Daysafe’s shell blocks frequencies from 10 MHz to 3 GHz, so a reader held next to your bag gets no answer from a card inside.
Two caveats belong with that. Contactless skimming is far rarer than the marketing around RFID wallets implies, because modern cards use one-time codes that make a captured tap hard to reuse, and shielding does nothing at all for the card you have taken out to pay with. What the feature is genuinely worth is the passport: an ePassport chip carries your name, date of birth and photograph, and there is no one-time code protecting that.
Actual performance over a month
The Daysafe held everything I travel with and stayed slim enough to bury in a bag, which is the pair of things most travel wallets fail at together. The Daysafe went through over a month of daily use and then a trip to Hong Kong and Australia, which is the trip that tests a wallet properly, with different currencies, boarding passes, a transit card and a passport all in play at once.
Cash and paperwork
Cash and paperwork share the main pocket, which takes notes without folding them because the wallet is taller than a note is wide. No currency I carried stuck out of the top. The same pocket swallowed boarding passes, an itinerary, receipts, and small flat things like plasters and a strip of tablets, which is the point at which a travel wallet stops being a wallet and starts being the thing you reach for first.
Card slots
The 8 card slots hold cards firmly without gripping them. Cards slide out without a fight and go back in without lining them up, and none of them worked loose over the month, which is exactly the failure that drove me off my previous wallet. 8 slots covered a debit card, two credit cards, a driving licence, an ID card, a medical card and two spares.
Passport pocket
The passport pocket is snug and still opens fast, which matters at a desk with a queue behind you. I do not keep my passport in it. I use it for my old Belgian driving licence, which is large, and for the cards I want with me but do not use daily, and a passport-sized pocket turns out to be the right shape for exactly that.
The zip
The zip runs around the full perimeter and closes the wallet completely, which is the structural difference from an open bifold. It glides rather than catches, and it is substantial enough that it looks like the last part of this wallet that will fail.
Durability and style
The Daysafe stayed sturdy without getting bulky, which is the balance the polyester shell is there for. The fabric wipes clean, resists a spill, and after a month of being stuffed into bags it had not stretched at the card slots or frayed at the corners.
The look is deliberately plain. Nothing on the outside announces that this is a technical wallet, which is what you want from a product whose purpose is to not be interesting to a stranger. I like it for the opposite reason as well: it does not look like a piece of travel gear when you pull it out in a shop at home.
The one drawback
The Daysafe is tall, and that is its only real fault. At 16 cm it does not drop into a jacket pocket or a back pocket the way a bifold does, so a quick trip to the shop means taking a bag or carrying the wallet in your hand. If you travel with a bag almost every time you leave the house, as I do, this never comes up. If you want a wallet you can pocket, buy a shorter one.
The verdict
The Pacsafe Daysafe passport wallet is worth carrying if you want one flat, zipped, RFID-shielded place for a passport, cards and cash, and you already carry a bag. It fixed the two things that had gone wrong with my old wallet, cards falling out and no shielding, without adding bulk, and a month of daily use plus a long-haul trip produced one complaint and no failures.
It is the wrong wallet if you want something pocketable, and it is more wallet than you need if you never travel with a passport.
What replaced the Pacsafe Daysafe
The Pacsafe RFIDsafe travel wallet replaced the Daysafe and is the model to buy now, since Pacsafe’s site no longer returns a Daysafe product at all. The RFIDsafe travel wallet keeps the same 8 card slots and adds a second RFID blocking passport pocket, a dedicated boarding-pass pocket, a zipped coin pocket, a pen loop, an internal key clip and an attachment point that clips it into a Pacsafe bag. It is made from 600D recycled polyester with a water-repellent shell rated to 1000 mm.
The trade is weight. The RFIDsafe wallet weighs 141 g (0.31 lb) against the Daysafe’s 80 g, so you are carrying nearly twice as much wallet for the extra pockets. Pacsafe lists it at $89.95 (about €85, £67) and the Pacsafe RFIDsafe travel wallet on Amazon has been running below that, which is the cheaper of the two places to buy it.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 4 tips below come from carrying this wallet daily and on a long-haul trip, most useful first.
- Put the passport in the shielded pocket and the driving licence in the card slots, not the other way round. The passport chip is the item RFID shielding genuinely protects, because bank cards already use one-time codes and a passport chip does not.
- Use the passport pocket for oversized cards if you keep your passport elsewhere. A large old-format driving licence fits it perfectly, and that is what mine holds.
- Check the 16 cm height against the pocket you expect to use. This wallet is designed to live in a bag. Every complaint I have about it comes from the one week I tried to treat it as a pocket wallet.
- Zip it before it goes into the bag, every time. The full-perimeter zip is the reason nothing falls out, and an unzipped travel wallet is worse than a bifold, because everything in it is loose rather than slotted.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from over a month of daily use of the Pacsafe Daysafe passport wallet, including a trip to Hong Kong and Australia. The team covers anti-theft travel gear for independent travellers, including the wallets, handbags and backpacks worth buying, and updates this page when models, prices and specifications change.
