51% of Americans Cut Spending to Afford a Vacation. Your Destination Better Be Worth It.

Happy Thursday, industry friends. 🥤

Okay. Let’s actually catch up, because I owe you a real one after sitting on this draft for nearly three weeks.

A lot has happened since I first wrote this. The Benito Bowl happened on February 8th, and if you were within five feet of a TV, you know it delivered. Bad Bunny performed almost entirely in Spanish to 128 million people, brought out Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Cardi B and Pedro Pascal, threw a literal wedding on stage (a wedding), and didn’t blink once. The week before, he’d picked up Album of the Year at the Grammys for the first fully Spanish-language album to ever win that award, walked to the mic, and said “ICE out” in front of everyone.

Then Trump called the halftime show “absolutely ridiculous,” which, depending on your disposition, either validated the whole thing or gave it 40 more minutes of free press coverage. Probably both. A Puerto Rican artist performing for the largest domestic television audience of the year, in his language, on his terms. File that under signals about where culture is heading… whether we’re ready or not.

Also: Seahawks beat the Patriots 29-13. The football gods finally settled the 2015 interception debt. Only took 11 years.

Now. While all of that was occupying the group chat, some other things were happening that are a lot more relevant to what we do.

The federal government shed somewhere around 300,000 workers over the past year via DOGE. Layoffs hit their highest monthly level since July 2020. January added 130,000 jobs, which sounds okay until you learn that 2025 only added 181,000 total for the entire year. Per U.S. Travel’s fall forecast, inbound international visits to the U.S. were projected to fall 6.3% in 2025, the steepest drop since 2020. Deloitte’s 2026 Travel Industry Outlook flagged that negative financial sentiment among high-income Americans jumped from 9% in 2024 to 15% in 2025. The people who were supposed to keep the premium travel economy running are getting nervous.

Oh, and Sojern dropped their 2026 State of Destination Marketing report yesterday. Based on 350-plus DMOs worldwide. I’ll be referencing it throughout this entire piece because it’s the most timely, most industry-specific data we have right now, and some of it is genuinely alarming in the best possible way.

So yes. We survived January. But we are absolutely, unmistakably, living through a weird, exhausting, structurally different moment. And it’s past time we talked about what that means for how people are traveling and how we lead destination organizations through it.

Quick personal update, and then we get into it.

A few weeks back, I stepped into a new role at Visit Corpus Christi as Chief Brand and Innovation Officer.

what’s super exciting is that I get to work at the intersection I’ve been talking about for years. Brand strategy and narrative, yes. But also the genuinely uncomfortable space where research, behavioral science and technology are reshaping how people decide where to go, what they skip, what they regret, what they overvalue and where destinations quietly lose people long before anyone shows up in the analytics. My job is to stress-test long-term assumptions so we’re proactive rather than reactive. To align innovation with brand integrity. To make sure we don’t separate the narrative from the data and watch both fall apart.

You cannot strip authentic human storytelling away from data and expect either one to survive. Work them together, with care and plenty of discernment, or watch them both collapse. Separate them, and you get hollow storytelling on one side or soulless optimization on the other. Neither works. Both are genuinely catastrophic for DMOs right now, and I plan to talk about this a lot more in the months ahead.

Two quick Destination Discourse shoutouts: "Surviving the Zombie Metrics" (Part II) just dropped. If you've ever presented room nights to elected officials and felt a creeping sense of professional dread, this one's for you. Also still worth your time: Longwoods International's Amir Eylon on why DMOs need to remember why people actually travel. Link at the bottom.

Alright. Let’s talk about the thing I’ve been sitting on.

The PTO Recession. And Why Your Room Night Report Is Missing the Whole Story.

We are very good at tracking dollars. We are decent at tracking trips. We are embarrassingly bad at tracking time scarcity, and time scarcity is the thing actually governing travel decisions in 2026. Not money. Not intent. Time.

I originally drafted this in late January. I’ve been sitting on it, watching the world get weirder thus tightening the argument. The delay made it sharper. Because everything that’s happened in the last six weeks has reinforced every single thing I’m about to say.

Time is the new budget. And a lot of Americans are broke on both.

Caleb Sullivan wrote a LinkedIn post on PTO-maxing that stuck with me, and he recently launched his own Substack too so go give him a follow. His observation was deceptively simple: people aren’t just rationing money. They’re rationing days. When time scarcity stacks on top of financial caution, travel behavior gets very sharp, very fast.

That’s the PTO Recession. Not a collapse, or mass cancellations… but something more subtle and more structurally significant than either.

What the Numbers Are Actually Saying

Longwoods’ January 2026 wave: 29% of U.S. visitors plan to take more trips in 2026. 19% plan fewer. 52% expect the same. People are not mass-canceling travel. But when budgets hold and calendars tighten at the same time, the same level of demand gets squeezed into fewer available days. The travel economy that produces does not behave like the one we’ve been reading off room nights alone. MMGY’s Winter 2026 Portrait of American Visitors: vacation budgets are rising by nearly $700 per person, but fear of disruptions is climbing and frequent flyer program membership jumped 10 points to 57%. Visitors are building certainty into a travel environment that feels increasingly uncertain.

Future Partners’ December 2025 pulse: the average expected leisure trips for 2026 is 3.8, down from 4.0. Only 23.6% of visitors expect to travel more this year, down 8.3 points from December 2024. The average maximum annual leisure travel budget fell to $5,511, an 11.3% drop from the prior month. And Deloitte identified a “cautious class”: high-income Americans earning $200,000-plus, whose negative financial sentiment jumped from 9% to 15% in a single year. 80% of them plan to travel more cheaply. If your destination has been riding the premium travel wave, put down your fridge cig and read that again.

PTO is no longer just a benefit. It’s leverage. It’s the unspoken negotiation between “I genuinely need time off” and “if I disappear for a week, is my inbox going to absolutely destroy me when I get back?” People still travel. But they travel more carefully, compress the trip, cut the extras and prioritize rest over novelty. The opportunity cost isn’t just money. It’s an irreplaceable day off.

In this current state of genuinely weird, exhausting world events, we all need a fucking break. The data confirms it.

The Sojern Report Landed Yesterday. Here’s What DMOs Actually Need to Hear.

Sojern’s 2026 State of Destination Marketing report, released February 17th and based on 350-plus DMOs worldwide, is the freshest industry-specific data we have. I want to sit in it for a minute because it confirms several things that have been true for a while and a few things that should genuinely reframe how we operate.

The number one strategic priority for DMOs in 2026 is measuring economic impact. Not visitation. 72% of DMOs are now focused on conversion and ROI metrics as their primary proof points. That’s a signal the entire industry felt the pressure of the last few years and collectively decided it needed to show its work.

Here’s the uncomfortable other side of that: awareness investment is collapsing. Global focus on awareness-stage marketing dropped from 59% in 2025 to 25% in 2026. In North America specifically, 51% of DMOs are now focused primarily on mid- and lower-funnel activity, with 31% citing conversions as their main goal, up from 15% just last year. As someone whose job is literally to steward brand vision and long-term narrative, I’ll say this plainly: chasing short-term conversion while gutting awareness investment is a strategy that works until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, it stops working all at once. Brand takes years to build and months to lose. The DMOs that abandon it now to chase cleaner attribution will spend twice as much trying to rebuild it in three years. You can quote me on that.

On AI, the numbers are striking. Two-thirds of DMOs (66%) now use AI for content creation. Use of AI for data analysis jumped from 28% to 51% in a single year. But 51% of DMOs say they are “concerned or actively preparing” for AI-driven search disruption, meaning roughly half the industry still isn’t. And 16% say they are not using AI at all.

16%. In 2026. I’ll let that sit.

The personalization data is where I got genuinely frustrated on behalf of this industry. Only 9% of DMOs describe their advertising as “advanced” in personalization. The share reporting only basic personalization rose year over year. We have more data, more tools and more traveler behavior signals than at any point in history, and most DMOs are still serving generic content to audiences that have already told us exactly what they want. A prioritization problem, not a tech problem. The tech has been there….but we just haven’t made it a priority.

AI Is Reshaping How Travelers Find You, Whether You’re Ready or Not

Here’s the thing I spend a significant portion of my day thinking about in this new role, and something I think the industry needs to be far more honest about.

Ahrefs data from February 2026 shows that Google AI Overviews now reduce website clicks by 58%. Fifty-eight. Google’s own AI answers are absorbing more than half the clicks that used to flow to destination websites. BrightEdge tracked AI Overviews jumping from appearing in 26.6% of searches in May 2024 to 44.4% by September 2025. And according to Noble Studios, DMOs across the industry are already seeing organic traffic fall 20% to 40% year over year.

The travelers arriving through AI-driven searches are about 4.5 times more valuable than those from traditional organic search when they do click through. So the volume is down and the quality is up, which is a genuinely interesting position that most organizations aren’t equipped to think about clearly yet. Your analytics are going to look broken, even if theyre not. The game changed.

This is why the Sojern stat about 31% of DMOs expecting their website to become a “source of truth” for AI-generated answers matters so much. Your website is no longer just a place someone visits. It’s a training data source for the AI models that are answering traveler questions before anyone ever types your URL. If your content is vague, outdated or structured for humans only, the AI answers being generated about your destination right now are probably wrong. And you’ll never see it happening. You’ll just wonder why the numbers look super weird.

Now, let’s talk about the AI landscape itself, because it is moving fast and the implications for DMOs are real.

Claude Sonnet 4.6, released February 17th, is being described by independent evaluators as delivering Opus-level performance at Sonnet pricing, with a 70% user preference rate over the previous version in blind tests. It leads for writing, analysis and long-document reasoning. ChatGPT continues to lead in multimodal tasks and ecosystem integrations, particularly inside Microsoft’s infrastructure. And Perplexity, DeepSeek and Gemini are each chipping away at different segments of the AI search market. The point is not which one wins. The point is, that your travelers are using all of them to plan trips right now.

They’re asking ChatGPT where to eat in your city. They’re asking Claude to build them a three-day itinerary. They’re asking AIs what the best time of year to visit is. And the answers those models generate are based entirely on what exists in your content ecosystem: your reviews, your partnerships, your press coverage and how well your brand narrative has been built and distributed across the open web.

If you’re not thinking about your destination’s AI presence the same way you think about your social media presence, you are already behind. This is the actual frontier of destination marketing in 2026, and it is moving whether or not your organization has a strategy for it yet. I’ll keep saying this until it’s no longer true.

The Inbound Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Here’s the layer I see a lot of industry newsletters skipping over.

Per the U.S. Travel Association’s forecast, inbound international visits were projected to drop 6.3% in 2025 while global international arrivals were growing. We went the wrong direction. The primary driver was significantly fewer visits from Canada, our single largest inbound market, combined with a policy environment sending a signal internationally that the welcome mat situation is, let’s say, complicated right now.

With FIFA World Cup coming to the U.S. in 2026, which was supposed to be a landmark inbound year for American destinations, there’s a real dollar figure attached to this. And Miles Partnership’s January 2026 investment in Downs & St. Germain Research is a meaningful signal that the smartest firms in destination marketing are doubling down on research infrastructure right now. They know something complicated is coming and they’re getting their data house in order.

Some of the headwinds your destination faces cannot be outspent on media. What you can control is the signal your destination sends: ease, warmth, clarity, welcome. Destinations that win international visitors right now make the experience feel unambiguously worth crossing a border for, and they make that clear before someone ever books a flight.

Rest. Is. the. Product. Saying This Again for the People in the Back.

Hilton’s 2026 Trends Report is one of the clearest “state of mind” data sets I’ve seen this year.

The top leisure travel motivation for 2026: rest and recharge at 56%. Time in nature at 37%. Improving mental health at 36%.

A demand signal with a number attached, not a branding trend.

Think about the context people are planning travel inside of right now. The layoffs. The relentless news cycle. Financial anxiety crawling into income brackets that were supposed to be safe. Per Deloitte’s holiday survey, one in three American workers described their financial situation as worse than a year ago. People are carrying a kind of tired that a three-day weekend does not fix. Travel is where a meaningful chunk of them are trying to fix it, and they are cutting everyday spending to make it happen.

Per USA TODAY’s January 2026 SurveyMonkey poll: 51% of Americans cut everyday spending to fund travel. One in five made significant cuts. People are treating travel like the thing that keeps them sane.

Which is both beautiful and genuinely sobering, because it means the emotional stakes of every trip have gone up to a level most destination experiences are not designed to absorb. If someone is skipping grocery runs and daily fridge cigs to afford your destination, they will not tolerate arriving somewhere disorganized, confusing or built to nickel-and-dime them. The margin for disappointment is gone. The opportunity to earn real, lasting loyalty has never been bigger.

Marketing “rest” without sounding like a 2017 Spirit magazine yoga retreat ad comes down to specificity. Rest is a set of concrete choices that reduce friction. Walkability. Quiet mornings. Dark skies. Easy parking. A hotel room that doesn’t feel like a punishment for wanting to travel. A beach someone can actually access without writing a logistics dissertation first. The marketing brief is the actual, tangible things that make someone believe, before they’ve ever booked, that they will feel better when they leave than when they arrived.

A hell of a different brief than our typical top 10 attractions listicle.

Decision Fatigue Is Quietly Eating Your Conversion Rate

When time is scarce, people stop wanting infinite options. They want confident defaults. This is well-documented behavioral science, and yet destination websites everywhere are still organized like outlet malls with no directory.

Hilton’s research found that 66% of visitors with kids or grandkids prefer all-inclusive, cruise or group tour formats specifically to reduce planning overhead.

Skyscanner’s solo travel filter usage jumped 83% year over year. 26% of travelers plan to travel alone in 2026 and nearly half are adding solo days before or after family trips. They’re not abandoning family travel. They’re carving out pockets of autonomy around it. When your calendar is maxed, a solo day is a survival tactic. Destinations that haven’t thought about how to market easy solo travel to this person are leaving something real on the table.

The 2026 Leisure Travel Study from TravelBoom found that 28% of travelers are cutting back on trip frequency due to rising costs. Nearly 80% prioritize food experiences. Over 70% have traveled or would travel specifically for a concert or cultural event. The shit that actually moves people off their couch is programming.

Reading Retreats Are Not a Joke, and I Will Stand on This

Hilton’s U.S. research via Morning Consult found that 68% of American visitors rank reading among their top leisure activities. 53% said they’d be interested in a dedicated reading retreat. Millennial interest: 67%. Skyscanner saw a 70% spike in hotel bookings using their library filter.

Sounds niche... but zoom out and it’s actually not.

People are craving uninterrupted attention. They want to remember what it feels like to be absorbed in something without a push notification yanking them out of it every 90 seconds. Every destination can create moments that feel like actual mental relief. The destinations that build that into their product and their story will own a deeply loyal segment of this market for a long time. You don’t have to become a library resort. You just have to stop making everything feel like a group activity at a volume level of eight.

What This Means for How We Lead

The PTO Recession is a leadership challenge, not just a marketing one.

Here’s where it lands: compete on time justification and not just attention. In a lot of planning conversations right now, your destination is competing against staying home and protecting a shrinking PTO balance. Messaging needs to answer the question travelers are silently asking: Will this trip make my life feel better? An economic calculation, risk assessment, all being made faster than most DMOs realize.

Your AI presence is now a product decision, not an IT one.

The Sojern report shows 51% of DMOs are concerned or actively preparing for AI search disruption. The other 49% should probably start their Monday with a conversation about what AI assistants are currently saying about their destination when someone asks. Because visitors are asking. Every. Day. And the answer being generated is based entirely on the content infrastructure your organization has or hasn’t built. Your website needs to be the source of truth for AI-generated answers about your destination. Structure your content that way. Invest in it that way. Yes, this is a whole thing and nooo, it cannot wait.

Stop gutting awareness to feed conversion.

The Sojern data on awareness investment collapsing from 59% to 25% globally in a single year is the data point I’d put in front of every board and city council right now. Short-term conversion metrics are easier to defend in a budget meeting. They’re also how you accidentally hollow out a brand without noticing until it’s already gone. The organizations that hold the line on awareness investment through this period will have a structural advantage in three to five years that their competitors will not be able to buy their way out of.

Frictionless planning is a product decision.

Fewer steps between curiosity and confidence. Clear itineraries. Clear parking. Clear “here’s what’s actually worth doing if you only have two days.” If your content requires visitors to assemble their trip like IKEA furniture while already exhausted, they’ll close the tab. And they won’t tell you why.

Sell the outcome.

Nature is nervous system recovery. A beach is sensory reset. A walkable downtown is decision reduction. The difference between “here are things to do” and “here’s how you’ll feel after” is huge. Close that gap and you have an actual content strategy, one that also happens to be far more likely to be cited correctly by AI tools answering visitor questions.

Segment by scarcity profile.

Some visitors are money scarce and time rich. Some are the opposite. (Some are both.) Some are high-income and still burned out. These groups behave very differently even at the same spend level. Future Partners’ data shows planning windows are shortening for younger travelers. The window to win them is compressing too.

Curate with conviction.

Visitors in decision fatigue will forgive fewer options when the options feel chosen by someone who genuinely knows the destination and gives a damn about their time. A confident, specific recommendation with a real reason behind it. Editorial courage. The organizations that have it will win quietly and steadily.

The Part I Want CEOs to Internalize

The PTO Recession turns every trip into a referendum on your destination.

If a time-scarce traveler burns their irreplaceable days off on a trip that stresses them out, confuses them or just doesn’t deliver what they needed, they don’t just regret the money. They regret the time. Time regret is radioactive. It reshapes future behavior, word of mouth and how fast they close the browser when your destination shows up in their feed next time. When a destination delivers what a burned-out, time-scarce, financially cautious traveler is actually buying, rest, ease, relief, a memory that genuinely earned its place on their calendar, the loyalty that produces cannot be replicated through a media buy. Full stop.

If you only look at spend, you miss the tension. If you only look at trip intent, you think everything is fine. Look through the lens of time scarcity, layer on the macro conditions that have made people feel genuinely unsettled and you see a structural re-ordering happening in real time. Fewer trips. More intentional ones. More outsourced planning. More AI-assisted defaults. More evaluation based on ease, trust and emotional payoff over novelty. And a much shorter fuse for anything that makes a trip feel like work.

A destination can execute well by every traditional standard metric and still underperform if the experience feels hard to plan, hard to access or hard to justify. A new kind of invisible. Not “we didn’t reach them.” “We never cleared their mental threshold to be considered.” That’s the part that should genuinely keep people up at night, because it doesn’t show up anywhere in the dashboard.

The advantage in 2026 is who makes it easiest for an exhausted, time-scarce, financially cautious human to say yes. And in a year when PTO feels like currency, the destinations that win will be the ones that actually respect the cost of the visit.

Time is the new budget.

Let’s act like it.