Americans Are Guarding Their Vacation Budgets Fiercely

Americans are refusing to give up their getaways. Even as household budgets stay under pressure, travelers are fiercely protecting their vacation budgets this fall — and new research says they are planning to spend more and travel more than they did this summer. Expected leisure travel spending for the next 12 months climbed to a figure north of fifty-six hundred dollars per traveler, while the average traveler now plans nearly four trips over the coming year, up from about three and a half a few months ago, according to MMGY's fall survey as reported by hospitality trade press. The study, based on interviews with 4,500 U.S. adults, is the industry's longest-running look at how Americans actually vacation.

But the headline number hides a deep generational split. Boomers expect to spend over four times as much on leisure travel as Gen Z travelers do — the older cohort's planned spending sits in the high eight thousands, while Gen Z's sits just above two thousand dollars. That gap matters because it shapes who the travel industry caters to: the travelers with the deepest pockets are also the oldest, while the youngest travelers are doing the most careful math. The survey's verdict is that there is no longer one definition of what a trip is worth.

How travelers are making the math work

Rather than canceling, people are getting strategic. About a third of leisure travelers say they are shifting their trips to off-peak periods, and nearly as many are cutting spending elsewhere in their lives to keep their travel plans intact. Two-thirds are leaning into domestic destinations specifically because they cost less. These trade-offs — when you go, where you go, and what you give up at home — are the engine behind the resilience in the numbers. For a generation that treats travel as a non-negotiable, that calculus should feel familiar: the trip happens; the restaurant week or the concert tickets might not.

"Travelers are becoming more strategic about when they go, where they spend and what they consider worth paying," said Simon Moriarty, MMGY's Vice President of Syndicated Research, as quoted in Breaking Travel News' coverage of the findings. He added that Americans keep saying travel is something they are willing to protect even when money is tight.

AI helps plan the trip — but humans still book it

More than half of leisure travelers have now used artificial intelligence for travel planning, up eleven percentage points from last year. The adoption is concentrated where you would expect: nearly three-quarters of Gen Z travelers and more than two-thirds of households with children have tried AI planning tools. But here is the twist — only a tiny share, about four in a hundred, rank AI among their first three steps when planning a trip. The pattern is clear: AI is shaping discovery, sparking ideas and narrowing options, while the actual booking still happens the old-fashioned way. Those discovery tools are effectively defending travelers' vacation budgets before a single dollar is spent. For budget-conscious Gen Z travelers, that means chatbots and itinerary generators are best used as free brainstorming help, not as a travel agent replacement.

Nature, meanwhile, refuses to go out of style. Among travelers interested in national parks, the vast majority put Yellowstone at the top of the list and two-thirds name the Grand Canyon — a reminder that the most enduring trips are often the ones that do not require a passport. More on travel trends on our travel topic page, including how personalization is reshaping 2026 itineraries — see also our piece on sweat jetting and soft clubbing, this year's most personal travel trends.

What this means if you're traveling on a Gen Z budget

Read through the data with young eyes and the playbook writes itself. Fly and stay midweek or shoulder-season — the off-peak crowd is already a third of all travelers, so you will be in good company. Swap the international flight for a national park road trip; domestic destinations are winning precisely because they stretch a dollar. And let AI do the early legwork: have it build three sample itineraries at different price points, then book the winner yourself. The appetite is there — as reported by Web in Travel, nearly nine in ten Millennial and Gen Z travelers plan to maintain or increase their travel budgets in 2026, a finding from Klook's Travel Pulse survey that echoes the same protect-the-trip instinct.

One important caveat: all of this is intent, not receipts. Saying you will spend more and actually spending more are different things, and economic shocks have a way of closing the gap between the two. The survey also quietly shows who still holds the wallet — older travelers are bankrolling the bulk of leisure spending, which means destinations and airlines will keep designing for them first. Young travelers may be the most creative trip planners, but the industry's price tags are still set with someone else in mind. Guarding your vacation budgets, then, is less about spending like the average American and more about borrowing their best tricks while spending like yourself.