Testing Today: Silca Viaggio Travel Pump

You bring your phone everywhere. It stands to reason you’d want to make it work more for you.

If you travel with your bike, you’ll need a pump. It also stands to reason you’d want to make it more compact for your travel needs.

Enter Silca’s $275 Viaggio (Italian for travel) Travel Pump. It packs down small thanks to its 22 1/4 -inch length with foldable feet and a removable handle. And it comes in its own canvas roll that doubles as a tool roll.

Like Silca’s Tattico Bluetooth Mini Pump, the Viaggio features a built-in Bluetooth gauge that works in conjunction with your smartphone. Silca says the gauge is accurate to within 0.5psi.

As travel pumps go, the Viaggio isn’t exactly small. It’s essentially a scaled-down floor pump. If you’re looking for something truly diminutive and packable, you’re probably better off with something like Lezyne’s Micro Floor Drive. But if you’re looking for something that’s bigger, more stable, and able to pump up your tires more quickly, the Viaggio is up to the task.

And it’s built for abuse. The 6061 aluminum barrel contains a full-metal shock piston, among other burly components. The removable handle is made from a thick aluminum that slides easily onto an aluminum mount on top of the piston. It’s burly and meant to feel like a real floor pump.

What will our testing look like?

Fortunately, we do a whole lot of traveling here in the VeloNews office, so we’ll have plenty of opportunities to see what the Viaggio is made of. For starters, it will be interesting to see how well this packs into the various travel cases we use — some are small enough to get around airlines’ oversize luggage regulations.

But more importantly, we’re curious to see how this stacks up against full-size floor pumps. It looks like one, but does it function like one? It looks and feels well constructed, but you’ll do without things like a big, heavy, stable base, not to mention an analog gauge we’re all used to.

And finally, much of the Viaggio’s viability as a travel pump will boil down to how seamlessly it integrates the Bluetooth gauge. On the one hand, it’s nice that it uses a smartphone, which is something we all carry with us anyway. On the other hand, it’s a pump, and adding one more component to the mix seems unnecessary when you could simply mount a small gauge somewhere on the pump itself. We’ll wait to cast judgment on the system until we explore the benefits and drawbacks on the road.