So sorry to start yet another thread on fast travel. Not taking sides and not looking for a debate. Just wanted to comment on my own ambivalence.

I’ve seen lots of ppl recommend not doing fast travel. I like to roleplay so that kinda makes sense. Problem is completing quests involve sooo much back and forth travel from one side of Skyrim to the other. (1) It takes too long. I actually have a life outside of Skyrim after all. (2) Because of aggressive fauna on the roads, one is likely to level too fast, as in leveling up several times just trying to complete one quest. And if I really want to complete a quest for some reason I get frustrated.

On the other hand, fast traveling to complete quests isn’t good either. I loose a sense of immersion with the character, and quite frankly all that instantaneous FT makes the game less enjoyable, makes it feel like work to accomplish and end, and it gives me a headache.

So for my three characters, one has completed a bunch of quests but almost always uses either FT or coaches where they are available. For another character, he never uses fast travel. That one is probably more enjoyable, but I’m not even going to try to complete any quests of consequence. Just doing hiking and alchemy and hunting and clearing out bandit strongholds occasionally. It’s pleasant, and no headache as long as I don’t get it in my mind that I want do some damn fool quest.

Main problem with no fast travel is that plenty of locations is very far from the carriage points, worse on return as every time you visit the collage you has to walk to Windhelm to get an carriage. I uses an mod who add carriages on all the one way locations and some other remote like dragon bridge and common places like riverwood, this makes fast travel pretty unneeded.

I like to walk everywhere or use the carrages occasionaly. But when i was doing the main quest, the constant visits to High Hrothgar test my patients, that i end up fast travelling up there. But i dont have any intentions of doing the MQ anytime soon with future characters, once is enough. Perhaps they could had put in a secret passage from Whiterun to High Hrothgar after the first visit, so it's a one click journey while keeping within the realms of roleplay.

I almost never fast travel unless it's necessary to correct a glitch (like "finding" a missing follower) or to get from Point A to Point B again after my initial arrival there by conventional means resulted in something that required a reload back at Point A.

That said I will use the carriage system without much reservation if some quest(s) I'm doing require multiple visits to the same location to advance the story. Book of Love would be one example. I don't mind walking from Riften to Ivarstead and back, but then I have to go to Markarth and come back to Riften and then almost all the way back to the Reach again and back to Riften again... no thanks, if my character has money enough to buy a ride for stuff like that then that's what I do. Using the carriage system is one of the perks of being an independently wealthy adventurer instead of a dirt poor one.

I still use it sparingly, though, as when overused I find it results in too frequent random encounters of an unpleasant nature, just like the fast travel "on foot" does.

Fast travel should be in the game.
You don't have to fast travel but it's a really neat thing to have.
And if you are only a bit like me, then you'll have a ton of different characters and that means that you don't want to walk around like a sloppy cow all the time.
In Morrowind it wasn't that big of a deal because of all the "make-you-fly-or/and-go-faster" items and spells.
Oblivion literally dependet on it because walking around for a couple of hours was boring and didn't add anything to the immersion.
Skyrim isn't as bad as Oblivion when it comes down to going around but it gets kind of boring and annoying really fast.

Tl;dr
You don't have to use it but it's good if you are bored or just not in the mood to walk down the same road for the x-time.

Thing is, Fast Travel has been part of these games since we had Mark and Recall spells (and the Intervention spells). In fact, with those spells, I never had to fight or make my way back out of a dungeon. Fast Travel is nothing new, it is just a variation on the Mark and Recall spell mechanics.

Now, the more one Fast Travels, the less of the world they will see and the less that they will discover. However, there are times when I just want to start and finish a quest without 5 or 10 more being added to my plate. So, what I do is use Fast Travel to get from one side of the map to the other, then walk the final part of the way. And, there are times when I load up the game and just go for a walk about. That is when I find stuff.

One way to resolve the Fast Travel conundrum is to say "I developed this character, made them strong and skilled, they should be able to walk across the map without me holding their hand so I let them" Kind of like when you first let your kid walk to school on their own, at some point, you just have to let go.

Actually the games had fast travel even besides the mark and recall spells.
You bascially were able to fast travel from town to town and a lot of dungeons (Daggerfall)
In the games after Morrowind they put the Marc and recall spells out of the game and you have a toned down version of it.
I for myself would prefere the way Morrowind handled it because everything you did was a part of the gameworld.
Now it's just clicking on the discovered location on your map.

I only fast travel if I have to go to work in 15 minutes, is that OK?

Since figuring that Fast Traveling has been what's lead to many unecessary Dragon and Vampire attacks for me, I've come to appreciate just doing it the hard way and hitting the road the old fashioned way.
Or carriage. Carriage is good too.

I try to avoid fast travel, though I sometimes "cheat", when I want to finish a quest and simply don't have time to walk, or when I want to finish something that bores me and I do just because-of (like when I did the CW on the Legion side and was bored to death by it and just wanted to get to the end so I could hear all the dialogue). I've noticed that FT makes me a bit disconnected with my characters, though. I don't mind using the carriage system, but maybe that is because I can't use it everywhere and all the time simply because there aren't carriages everywhere.

Regarding those quests that forces you to travel all around Skyrim: I never do them from start to end at once. My mage, for example, started Forbidden Legend when he visited Saarthal around level 8. Now he's level 38 and still hasn't finished it. He has done the different dungeons when he's been in the vicinity. Same when I did Book of Love with another character, she did the Ivarstead mission on her way from Riften to Windhelm, reported next time she had errands in Riften, and then the Markarth mission when she had a couple of other errands there as well (that, and Mephala's quest, turned out to be a PITA, though, since the outcome of the civil war had forced some of the persons involved to move to Solitude...).

I fast travel sometimes when I'm my characer is just feeling lazy.

I don't use fast travel.
Never have, never will.
It ruins immersion for me.

And carriages are fast travel. I don't see a difference between using them or using the map. Both get you places in an instant without the chance of danger or random encounters.

What's the hurry? I have about four more years to complete this game before TES VI comes out.

I installed a mod that makes the horses actually usable (Convenient Horses); since then I fast travel much less than I used to. I still use fast travel on occasion, though. Usually when it's late and I'm wanting to finish up in position to start my next task and don't feel like riding all the way across the map to get there.

In Daggerfall you cold fast travel to dungeons and places you had not visited. You also had mark and recal however it was mostly used inside the dungeon.
The Daggerfall dungeons was gigantic, think the largest in Skyrim but without internal load zones and no fast exit.

Morrowind had two problems for me. First was the complex transport system, you had to mix teleportes, boats and land transport in addition to the special dwemer teleporter. Second was that many useful locations like your stronghold was far from them.

One my first game, FT was prohibited. I used carriages, but that's it. By my 5th game, FT and I were very close and sleeping together (I think it's preggers).

Like many, the absolutely tedious crap of going between cities for the dumbest of things makes FT nearly impossible to avoid, especially on replay, where I want things more casual. On a regular horse, it takes me 18 real-time minutes to get from Riften to Solitude, so imagine how frustrating it is when the game's mechanics is: "Dragonborn, do this. Okay, now do this. Oh, those guys doing nothing but shooting arrows into a target all day? Ignore them. They're background art."

Seriously, that's the most annoying part about the immersion, seeing people who are supposed to be doing things standing around doing nothing, or worse, telling me to do their job.

Let's hope TES 6 rids us all of this annoying "Quest on Rails".

I like to slow travel as much as possible but I still use fast travel. Depends on what I'm doing. If its a like a minor quest that needs me to hand something to someone and that completes it, I'll fast travel to them. Or if I am going from one end of the map to the other but don't have personal time to, I'll fast travel part way.

But you can miss so much by fast traveling, I hate doing it but sometimes, you just have no choice if you want to get things done.