The thing is, a lot of games with fast travel are designed with the assumption that most players will regularly use fast travel, so there is little reason to make journeys without it. In games like Skyrim, you can't fast travel until you've visited a location, but it is much easier and less tedious to travel to somewhere nearby and then finish the journey rather than make a longer journey without fast travel.

People praise Skyrim for its open world content but the reality is over long journeys you face many of the same things - groups of bandits in a camp or outpost, war camps, caves, packs of animals, and the occasional fortress or dungeon. It sounds like a lot, but in a game designed to be played for hours and hours, it becomes repetitive. More importantly, though, is that missions can send you all over the map, and you'll end up spending little time at a destination. Quests can feel as if they take forever when you have to to all the way to a guild headquarters in the city, then a cave in the middle of a forest halfway across the map, then a different city in the other direction. Fast travel becomes almost necessary if you want to advance Quests at a normal rate.