I had a large Tumi suitcase. It got dirty on the first trip, because those conveyor belts are filthy and the baggage handlers always put the suitcase on the front.
I spent a couple of hundred repairing it twice because the handle kept tearing off. That's the top handle.
I pack the large suitcase up to the limit and probably sometimes beyond it. I overpack and for now, I'm not changing my behavior.
Typically for a 2-3 week international trip, you get two carry-on allowance and I used to check in a large and a small suitcase in addition to a roller carryon.
But now it's just one large suitcase checked in and it's soft sided, so I can stuff it, like when I return, I put the clothes which need to be washed in the outside compartment and I'm not neatly folding them so that they can have the least amount of volume.
So for checked-cases, I'm going cheap as I can go while still getting good enough quality. I bought an IT 28 or 29-inch bag which was much lighter than other suitcases of similar size. You could tell why, it doesn't have the big rigid frame of the Tumi which also made it heavy.
The first one didn't last and under warranty the company sent me another and I've been using that the past 4 years or so. It's outlasted the Tumi.
Originally I think I paid somewhere between $60-80.
For the carryon, for now I'm still traveling with a lot of electronics so it has to have a separate laptop compartment easily accessed from the outside. I bought a TravelPro a couple of years ago for about $200-250. I don't put any clothing in there. I was once stranded when my checked suitcase was delayed by 4-5 days.
I spent about $60-80 in Austria to buy some clothes. It was summer so even in Salzburg, all I needed was some underwear, shorts,T-shirts and socks. Airline reimbursed me.
I rationalize spending a lot more on the carryon because I never plan to check the bag, so it still looks clean, as did my previous carryon.
It's two wheels, not a spinner. The checked suitcase is a spinner. Both work fine, though the big 2-wheel rollers are better if you anticipate having to wheel your luggage some distance, like say you anticipate taking public transportation, in which case you're more likely to have to wheel through sidewalks and even some streets.
Long time ago, I broke the casters on one suitcase rolling them about a kilometer through the streets of Florence, which had cobblestone sidewalks. I would have been better off taking a taxi or something.
