The Price of Travel Has Changed. Should Your Plans?
By Jessica Breugelmans | The Curated Atlas
I frequently joke that my husband is stuck in the 1980s.
And not only his music and clothes.
His expectations of what things should cost are firmly planted there, too. He'll tell me what he thinks something should cost, and I'll have to remind him that, unfortunately, it's no longer 1987.
Lately, though, I've started wondering if I'm becoming my husband.
I look at travel pricing every day, and even I occasionally find myself staring at a quote thinking, Wait. It costs HOW much now?
A beautiful hotel on the Amalfi Coast. Business-class airfare to Europe. A luxury resort in Hawaii over the holidays. Some of the numbers feel a little absurd.
But are they?
That's what I wanted to know. Has travel actually become disproportionately expensive, or are we comparing today's prices to numbers that simply don't exist anymore?
Yes, Travel Got More Expensive
Let's start with the number that probably explains why so many of us are experiencing sticker shock.
By August 2026, overall U.S. travel prices were approximately 30% higher than they were in 2019.
And we didn't get there gradually.
According to the U.S. Travel Association, overall travel prices increased 9% in 2021 and another 13.7% in 2022. Hotels were even more dramatic, increasing 21.6% in 2021 and another 20% in 2022.
Then things settled down. Travel inflation slowed to 2.5% in 2023, 0.9% in 2024, and was projected at 1.3% for 2025.
But those post-pandemic increases didn't reverse. Lower inflation doesn't mean lower prices. It simply means prices aren't increasing as quickly.
We've essentially had several years of relatively normal travel inflation layered on top of a very abnormal jump in prices. So if you're looking at the cost of a trip today and thinking it seems dramatically more expensive than it was five or six years ago, you're not imagining it.
It is.
What I find more interesting now is what's driving prices today, because not every part of travel is moving in the same direction.
Airfare Is Having a Moment, and Not a Good One
The number that really stands out in 2026 is airfare.
In August, airfare was up 23.4% year over year. Hotels, by comparison, were up just 2.9%.
That's a huge difference. It also tells us this isn't simply a story of more people wanting to travel and pushing the price of everything higher.
Airlines are dealing with higher fuel prices, increased operating costs, aircraft constraints and geopolitical disruptions that can close airspace or force longer and more expensive routes. At the same time, demand isn't necessarily increasing at anything close to the rate airfare has.
Normally, we think of softer demand as something that should eventually lead to lower prices. Airlines, however, have another option. They can reduce capacity.
Instead of continuing to operate the same number of flights and discounting seats to fill them, an airline can trim schedules or reduce the number of available seats on a route. Fewer available seats can help keep fares from falling even when demand softens.
So waiting for weaker demand to automatically produce dramatically cheaper tickets may not always work. Airfare is influenced by demand, but also by fuel costs, available aircraft, route economics, competition and what's happening geopolitically thousands of miles away.
For travelers, I think that means we need to separate the cost of getting somewhere from the value of being there.
Staying Closer Isn't Necessarily Cheaper
When international airfare jumps, staying closer to home sounds like an obvious solution. Skip Europe, avoid the expensive international flights and go somewhere in the United States instead.
Sometimes that absolutely will save money. But distance is only one component of what a trip costs.
A luxury vacation includes airfare, accommodations, transportation, dining, experiences, guides, activities and everything else that happens once you arrive. Saving on the flight doesn't necessarily mean saving on the trip.
A beautiful resort in Hawaii during a school break can cost substantially more than an equally exceptional hotel somewhere farther away. The same can be true of popular luxury destinations in California, Montana or the Caribbean.
And the reverse can happen internationally. Even within Europe, the price difference between two destinations offering a similar type of vacation can be enormous.
So I don't think the most useful question is whether to travel domestically or internationally.
I'd rather ask: What experience do I want, and where can I have the best version of it for what I'm comfortable spending?
Because increasingly, the bigger price difference may not be between traveling near or far. It may be between traveling somewhere everyone wants to go and somewhere they haven't discovered yet.
Sometimes You're Paying for the Destination
Take the Amalfi Coast.
It's spectacular. There's a reason it's on so many wish lists, and there's also a reason beautiful hotels there can command extraordinary rates during the summer. A lot of people want the same limited number of rooms at exactly the same time.
If someone tells me, I've dreamed of staying in Positano for ten years, that's one conversation.
Go to Positano.
Sometimes the destination itself is the experience, and replacing it with somewhere less expensive misses the entire point.
But if what they're really telling me is, I want gorgeous coastline, incredible food, charming towns, time on the water and a beautiful hotel, that's a different conversation.
Maybe another part of Italy makes sense. Maybe Croatia. Maybe Montenegro.
Those aren't budget versions of the Amalfi Coast. They're completely different destinations with their own reasons to visit. But they may deliver the experience someone is actually looking for without quite the same demand premium.
The question isn't necessarily how to spend less. It's whether the destination commanding the premium is the part of the trip you actually value most.
What If We Just Wait?
Of course, we could wait for travel prices to come back down.
I wouldn't count on it.
The U.S. Travel Association's baseline forecast calls for overall travel prices to increase approximately 2.2% in 2027, 2.4% in 2028 and 2.3% in 2029. That's roughly another 7% over three years.
Those forecasts were published before some of 2026's energy and geopolitical disruptions, so they're estimates, not promises. Individual destinations can certainly become less expensive. Demand changes. Exchange rates move. Airlines add routes. New hotels open and create competition.
But broadly speaking, the forecasts aren't suggesting we're headed back to pre-pandemic travel prices. They're suggesting more normal inflation on top of the prices we have today.
If waiting for the entire travel market to reset isn't much of a strategy, then I think we have three practical choices.
Pay the Premium
Sometimes this is absolutely the answer.
You want Paris. You want Amalfi. You want Hawaii over Christmas. Maybe you've dreamed about the trip for years, there's a particular hotel you want to experience, you're celebrating something important, or you simply love the destination.
If that's what matters to you, paying the premium can be entirely worthwhile.
Value doesn't always mean getting more for less. Sometimes value is getting exactly what you wanted.
Change the Timing
That $2,000-a-night Mediterranean hotel in July may look very different during another part of the season.
The benefit isn't necessarily just price. You may find fewer crowds, easier restaurant reservations, better access to guides and experiences, and an entirely different atmosphere.
Of course, families have school calendars and adults have jobs. We can't all magically travel on a random Tuesday in October. Sometimes peak season is peak season because that's when you can go.
But if your dates are flexible, changing when you travel can sometimes preserve the destination you want while changing both the price and the experience.
Change the Destination
This is the option I think gets overlooked.
Instead of asking, What's a cheaper version of this trip? I think the better question is, What am I actually hoping to experience?
You're not trying to replicate Amalfi somewhere cheaper. You're figuring out whether Amalfi was actually the thing you wanted in the first place, or whether it was the beautiful coastline, incredible food, gorgeous hotel and time on the water that attracted you to it.
Once you know that, the world gets considerably bigger.
And sometimes the place you hadn't originally considered ends up being the trip you talk about for years.
Maybe My Husband Has a Point
Which brings me back to my husband.
He's probably never going to accept that things don't cost what they did in the 1980s. And apparently I'm developing some of the same tendencies.
But maybe questioning the price isn't such a bad instinct.
Being able to afford something and deciding it's worth what it costs are two very different things.
When both your money and your vacation time are valuable, it makes sense to be discerning about where you spend them.
There will be trips where I'd happily pay the premium because the destination, hotel or experience is the whole point. There will be others where changing the dates makes far more sense. And there will be times when a destination I hadn't originally considered gives me everything I was looking for, perhaps even better than the place I initially had in mind.
Travel has changed. Prices have changed. Maybe the way we think about where and when we travel needs to change a little, too.
Even if my husband would still prefer that everything just cost what it did in 1987.
Jessica Breugelmans is the founder of The Curated Atlas, a luxury travel agency creating meaningful, custom travel for those who want to make the most of their time away and invest in truly exceptional experiences.
Sources
U.S. Travel Association, Travel Price Index and Fall 2025 Travel Forecast; Global Business Travel Association, 2027 Travel Price Forecast. Data current as of October 2026. Forecasts are estimates and individual travel pricing varies significantly by destination, season, availability and type of travel.
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