carry-on or check-in baggage

Advantages of taking only carry-on luggage

The airline won't lose your bags! Always the scorn of travelers, lost luggage can be a real drag. And if this happens, the air carrier will do little to compensate you, except to deliver your bag to your home or hotel, often many hours or even days after your luggage was lost.

When you get to your destination, you can just zip right through the airport to your rental car, taxi, or shuttle, and not have to wait endlessly for your bag to show up on that baggage carousel.

If your flight is delayed (or canceled altogether) and you missed your connecting flight, you have your bags with you and are much more flexible. Perhaps there is another flight you can be re-routed to, or a flight going to a nearby airport. Remember, if you check your bags, those bags will stay on the scheduled flight (in most cases), even if that flight is delayed by hours and you can be re-booked on a different flight. The airline will simply send your bag on the originally-scheduled flight, requiring that you stick it out at your destination or return to the airport what that flight arrives.

Another advantage is that you keep your bag securely with you, thus eliminating the chance that your camera fails to zoom anymore after being zoomed into the cargo hold by a guy who used to work lugging concrete bags at construction sites, or worse, that it 'sprouted legs' and disappeared en-route to your arrival airport.

Advantages of checking your bags

You can take a lot more stuff. Since airlines restrict what you can carry-on board the airplane, you have to pack very carefully (read: don't take that kitchen sink). If you're traveling on a trip of a few days, you can probably get by carrying your bags on-board the flight, but if you plan to fly with lots of gifts and goodies, you'll be much better off checking your bags.

You won't have to fight 280 people for that elusive overhead bin space (the area above your seat that always seems to be 1 inch smaller than your bag). Since most business travelers tend to take shorter trips and hence don't check-in luggage, and they are priveleged to board before the rest of the masses, chances are the overhead bins might be full by the time you embark your flight, or, the only space available is all the way in the back over 49E, and your seat is in 12A (meaning you have to wait until all the passengers disembark at the destination airport to wait to get back and retrieve your bag at baggage claim.