Rising prices usually produce a simple prediction: demand falls. Fewer people travel when travel costs more. It is intuitive, it shows up in plenty of other categories of spending, and it is largely wrong for how people are actually responding to this year’s higher travel costs.
A recent study from Skift, a leading voice in global travel research, shows what travelers are doing instead, and the pattern is more specific and more interesting than a simple pullback.
What people are actually cutting
Facing higher prices this year, the overwhelming majority of travelers report they will still travel. What changes is not whether, but how.
Roughly 37% are searching for cheaper flights. About 30% are choosing less expensive destinations. Another 30% are shortening trips. Around 20% are accepting lower-quality accommodation, and a similar share are simply traveling less often. Look at that list again. Every single item on it is a way of preserving the trip while reducing something inside it. Almost nobody’s first move is canceling the trip outright.
This is the opposite of how price sensitivity usually works in retail, where a category under cost pressure typically sees volume fall first and mix shift second. Travel is behaving like a category where the trip itself sits closer to a fixed cost of living than a discretionary purchase that gets cut when money tightens.
The income split that complicates the story
The picture gets more textured once you separate travelers by income, and it resists an easy morality tale about the wealthy being untouched and everyone else suffering.
Higher earners are not trading down at anywhere near the rate of lower earners, but they are not indifferent to cost either. They are optimizing: watching prices more closely, adjusting timing, choosing smarter rather than choosing less. Lower earners are the ones actually trading down, in the more visible sense of shorter trips, cheaper destinations, lower-tier accommodation. The luxury end of the market has proven durable through exactly the same price pressure that is reshaping the middle and lower end of it.
That split matters for anyone selling into this market, because it means the demand curve is not one curve. It is at least two, moving somewhat independently, and treating the whole traveler base as a single price-sensitive population will misread both segments.
Why the trip survives even when the budget does not
I think the explanation sits in what a trip actually represents to the person taking it, which is rarely just the transportation and the room.
A trip usually anchors something else: a wedding, a reunion, a long-planned milestone, a piece of identity the person has built around being someone who travels. Cutting the trip entirely means cutting that anchor, and the data suggests people will absorb a great deal of discomfort in the logistics before they give up the anchor itself. A shorter trip to a cheaper destination in a lower-tier hotel is still the trip. A cancelled trip is not a smaller version of anything. It is a different outcome entirely, and travelers appear to treat it that way, reserving cancellation for genuine last resort rather than a first response to a higher fare.
I have written before about the industry-wide version of this pattern, where global spending grows faster than the number of trips taken because price is absorbing most of this year’s pressure. This consumer-level data is the same story from the other side of the transaction: the traveler is absorbing the price increase inside the trip, category by category, rather than walking away from the trip altogether.
What this means for anyone selling or managing travel
If you sell travel, the mistake is assuming a price increase will cost you the customer. The data suggests it is far more likely to cost you a line item inside their itinerary than the itinerary itself. The traveler who cannot afford the destination they wanted last year is not gone. They are looking at your cheaper inventory, your shorter package, your off-peak dates.
If you manage a corporate travel program, the same logic applies with a different frame. Employees are not going to stop traveling because costs rose. They are going to look for permission to cut somewhere, and a program that gives them a structured way to do that, a slightly less expensive hotel tier, an earlier booking window, a nonstop instead of a connection with a lounge, will capture the saving the traveler was already looking for. A program that offers no structured way to trade down simply pushes that same instinct toward whatever workaround the traveler invents on their own.
The trip is the last thing to go
So the headline prediction, that higher prices reduce travel, turns out to describe the wrong variable. Higher prices are reshaping travel, category by category, trip by trip, while leaving the decision to travel at all remarkably intact.
That resilience is not evidence that price does not matter. It is evidence of what travelers value most inside a budget under pressure, and it is the trip, not any particular version of it. Everything else is negotiable first.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.