There is a familiar way to talk about spending when money gets tight. Essentials stay. Luxuries go. Households pull back on the restaurant meals, the new clothes, the upgraded television, the furniture they can live without and, somewhere near the top of that discretionary list, the vacation. Travel is expensive, temporary and easy to postpone. At least, that is how the category is usually described.
The latest national tracking study from Longwoods International suggests that many Americans are no longer behaving as though travel belongs neatly in that category. In the company’s September survey, 75% of American travelers said travel is becoming too expensive, up sharply from 64% a year earlier.
That should be the kind of number that sends vacation plans collapsing under the weight of airfare, hotels, meals and everything else that has become harder to justify. Instead, 81% said vacations are among the things they most look forward to each year, 55% said they are willing to cut spending in other areas in order to fund their trips, and 87% reported having travel planned within the next six months.
That last figure is down from 93% last October, so the pressure is real. People are not somehow insulated from higher prices, and the Longwoods numbers do not describe a country cheerfully ignoring its bank statements. What they describe is more interesting: travel is being squeezed, but a large share of travelers are responding by defending it.
The trip is not necessarily the first thing to disappear when the budget tightens. For many people, it has become one of the things around which the rest of the discretionary budget gets reorganized.
That is a meaningful cultural change because it complicates the old distinction between necessities and luxuries. Travel is still discretionary in the strict financial sense. Nobody needs a beach rental, a national park road trip or a week in another city in the same way they need housing, food or medicine.
But people do not build their lives entirely around accounting categories. They build them around things that feel important, and Longwoods found that 74% of travelers now say the experiences they get from travel matter more to them than acquiring material belongings.
That number may explain why the usual logic of belt-tightening does not work as cleanly as expected. For many households that still have room for discretionary spending, the meaningful contest is not rent versus vacation. It is vacation versus the other optional things money can buy: the new television, the living-room furniture, the extra clothes, the restaurant nights and the upgrades that can be postponed for another year.
The question is no longer simply whether travel is expensive, but whether those other uses of the money feel more valuable than the experience being protected. Increasingly, the stuff loses.
Previous generations had plenty of experiences, of course, and plenty of people have always valued travel. What has changed is the cultural role consumption plays in signaling that a life is going well. For much of the last century, success was made visible through accumulation.
The house, the car, the dining set, the stereo system, the jewelry, the china cabinet and the nicer version of whatever sat in the neighbor’s driveway all had the advantage of remaining physically present. They could be used, displayed and quietly read by everyone who walked through the door.
Experiences work differently. They disappear almost as soon as they happen, yet they are strangely durable. A trip becomes photographs, stories, inside jokes, souvenirs, favorite restaurants, repeated anecdotes and the place everyone keeps saying they should visit again.
It travels socially long after the traveler comes home. In an era when nearly every phone is also a camera and nearly every social platform is built to distribute moments, experiences can be every bit as visible as possessions while carrying a different kind of status: not what you own, but what you have done.
The most revealing number in the Longwoods study may therefore be the one that has the least to do with tourism economics. Eighty-four percent of travelers said traveling with friends and family brings them closer together, up from 78% a year ago. That turns the purchase into something larger than a hotel room or a plane ticket. People may be buying concentrated time with one another, something that ordinary life has become surprisingly bad at providing.
Most families do not lack affection; they lack uninterrupted time. Work follows people home. School calendars collide with sports schedules. Phones keep everyone reachable while simultaneously making attention easier to fracture. Even a dinner together has an end time. Travel creates one of the few socially accepted reasons to step outside those routines for several consecutive days and say, in effect, that everyone is going to be in the same place now. The destination matters, but so does the temporary removal from the machinery of normal life.
That helps explain why people might protect a trip even while complaining, correctly, that travel has become too expensive. They are not only purchasing transportation and lodging. They are purchasing anticipation before the trip, separation from routine during it and memory after it. A physical purchase usually delivers most of its value after the transaction. Travel begins paying emotional dividends before anyone leaves the house and can keep paying them years later whenever the story is retold.
There is also a useful correction here to the way consumer weakness is often discussed. When households pull back, it is tempting to imagine a simple retreat from spending altogether. In reality, people make choices among categories, and those choices reveal what has moved up or down in importance.
If more than half of travelers are willing to spend less elsewhere in order to keep traveling, then the question is not whether consumers are under pressure. Longwoods clearly shows that they are. The question is what they refuse to surrender first.
For a growing number of Americans, the answer appears to be the experience itself. That does not make travel affordable, and it does not make every trip financially wise. It does mean that calling vacation a luxury can obscure what people believe they are actually buying, because the trip may be temporary while the value they assign to it is not.
Everything may be too expensive, and Americans are noticing it and adjusting accordingly. Some are traveling less often, choosing differently or trimming elsewhere to make the numbers work.
But the larger signal in the Longwoods data is difficult to miss: when forced to choose between another thing and another memory, a surprising number of people have already decided which one they would rather keep.
Source note
• Primary research: Longwoods International, American Travel Sentiment Wave 111, fielded Sept. 1–4, 2026, national sample of 1,000 U.S. adults. Read the Longwoods release.
• Release coverage: Ohio Society of Association Professionals.
Survey findings attributed to Longwoods International's American Travel Sentiment Wave 111 and the release coverage cited in Source note. Cultural framing is RMN's.