The fee is the part everyone talks about. It was never the part that changed my mind.
The last time I checked a bag, I spent twenty-five minutes at a carousel in Melbourne watching other people's suitcases go past. My flight had landed early. That head start was long gone by the time my bag finally appeared, second from last, with a wheel that now spun sideways. Somewhere in those twenty-five minutes I decided I was done.
The maths made the decision easy to keep. Add a checked bag to a Jetstar domestic flight at the airport and it's $120 for the first one, then $30 for every kilo you go over. Book it online ahead of time and it's cheaper, but you're still paying to hand over a bag, wait for it at the other end, and quietly hope it turns up. For a weekend in another city, that's a lot of money and time spent on luggage that never actually leaves the airport with you.
The fee is a real problem, and for most people it's the one that stings first. But it isn't the biggest one. The bigger problem is everything attached to it. The queue at the counter. The twenty-five minutes at the far end. The small, constant awareness that my trip was, in a real sense, waiting on a conveyor belt. You don't notice how much of that you're carrying until you put it down.
There's also the part nobody advertises. Bags go missing. Not often, but often enough that everyone has a story, and the story is never "it turned up on the next flight and everything was fine." A checked bag is a quiet bet that the airline's day runs smoothly. Carry-on is simply not making the bet.
The rules are simpler than they look
So I stopped. One bag, cabin only, every trip since. It took a couple of goes to get right, and the thing that made it click was realising the rules are far simpler than the airlines make them feel. Qantas and Virgin both take a carry-on up to 56 by 36 by 23 centimetres for free, Qantas to 10 kilograms, Virgin to 8 plus a small item under the seat. Find a bag that fits that frame and you walk straight onto either.
Jetstar is the exception, and worth knowing about. From 2 February 2027 it is scrapping the old free 7kg carry-on. Your free bag becomes a small under-seat one, 40 by 30 by 20 centimetres, and a full-size overhead carry-on becomes a paid extra, Priority Carry-on from $25. So on Jetstar the honest move is either to travel light enough for the little under-seat bag, or to pay for the overhead and still skip the checked bag. Even paid, it beats the wait and the risk at the carousel.
A carry-on limit sounds like plenty until you weigh a bag you've packed the normal way and find it closer to twelve. Most of that difference is redundancy. Two jumpers where one does the job. A toiletry bag built for a fortnight away. Once you pack to the weight on purpose, a weekend fits easily, and a week fits with a small laundry habit and no drama.
The bag matters more than people expect
When people try carry-on only and give up, it's almost always one of two things. Either they bought a bag that doesn't hold its shape, so it fails the sizer even though it's technically small enough. Or they packed for the trip they were afraid of instead of the trip they were actually taking.
The bag is the half you can fix by buying once and buying well. A soft, unstructured backpack looks fine on your shoulders and then collapses into a shapeless lump the moment an airline asks you to drop it in the metal sizer. I carry a Transit 26L now. It holds the cabin shape, the zips lock, and 26 litres is enough for a week if you pack with any discipline at all. For a trip that wants a duffle rather than a backpack, I take the Flex 27L instead. Both clear the frame, and both swallow more than they look like they should.
You land, you stand up, and you leave. Past the carousel, out the doors, into the city.
The packing itself is less dramatic than the internet makes it. Roll your clothes, don't fold them. Wear the bulkiest things onto the plane. Keep one pouch for cables and chargers so you're not turning the whole bag out at security. Give yourself one spare outfit, not three. Almost everything I used to check was insurance against a problem that never came.
It's made the biggest difference to work trips. Fly in, walk straight to the meeting, no detour to a carousel and nothing to drop at a hotel first. A day trip interstate stops feeling like a production and starts feeling like a longer commute.
The best part isn't the money, although the money adds up faster than you'd think across a year of trips. It's the walk. You land, you stand up, and you leave. Past the carousel, out the doors, and into the city while the checked bags are still going around behind you. I've been early to more things in the last year than in the ten before it. None of it is luck. The bag just never left my back.
