I like the EasyJet carryon rule as to weight. As long as one person can heft it into the overhead by himself, then it is fine.

I tend to travel light, so I have never paid a luggage fee with LCC's.

Ryanair is the worst to deal with, but I would not put others like EasyJet, Germanwings, SkyEurope, Wizz, or Aegean, in the same category.

You DO need to look at where the airports are. EasyJet has a lot of flights out of Gatwick, London's best airport, for example, and you can still find TATL flights into Gatwick, in spite of some of the morons in the ailine business who have shifted flights to ''the hell that is Heathrow'' as one UK magazine aptly descirbed it. For Paris, many LCC's use Orly which is at least as convenient to the city as CDG, but watch out for those which use Beauvais, which is a looong way from the city. SkyEurope uses the main Vienna airport as one of its larger bases. In Bucharest, many LCC's use Baenesa, which is actually closer to the city than Otopeni, but is still a real pit of an airport in spite of a recent renovation.