Only 1% of Travelers Are Canceling Trips

Skift Research published its State of Travel 2026 report this week, and one number in it is worth sitting with. Asked how rising prices would change their plans, only 1 percent of travelers said they would postpone or cancel a trip.

One percent. After a year of hotel rates climbing, airfare volatility, and a general mood of people saying they are tightening up.

The rest of the distribution tells you what is actually happening. Fifty-two percent said they will still travel but adjust their plans. Thirty-six percent said they will keep traveling without cutting back at all. Nine percent expect to travel less than originally planned. The survey covered 830 travelers across the US, UK, China, and India.

Cancellation is not the pressure valve. Substitution is.

The intuition most people carry is that when travel gets expensive, trips disappear. The data says something different. Trips get restructured. A five-night trip becomes four. A beach resort becomes a beach town. A flight to Europe becomes a flight to Mexico. The trip survives. The line items change.

We see the same shape in booking behavior. Use of the budget filter on major booking platforms has surged more than 1,800 percent, and rewards filters are up more than 800 percent. Nobody applies a budget filter on their way to canceling a trip. They apply it on their way to booking a cheaper one.

This matters for how you plan your own year. If you assumed demand would soften and prices would follow, that assumption has now been tested and it did not hold. Average US hotel and motel rates are up about 2.6 percent over the past year even with everyone reportedly economizing.

The income split is the interesting part

Skift broke the cost-management strategies down by income, and the pattern is not what the headline suggests.

Optimization is close to universal. Roughly half of every income band is hunting for a better version of the same trip. What separates the bands is trading down. Lower-income travelers downgrade the experience at nearly three times the rate of high earners.

Read that as a definition of what money buys in travel right now. It does not buy you out of price shopping. It buys you out of accepting a worse trip.

What optimization actually looks like in practice

The word optimization does a lot of hiding. In hotel booking specifically, it usually means one of five things.

Moving the booking window. The cheapest window has compressed to roughly 8 to 14 days out for domestic US stays, which is much tighter than the six-weeks-ahead advice most people still carry around. We wrote about that shift here.

Moving the night. Sunday arrivals price meaningfully below Friday and Saturday in leisure markets, and below Tuesday in business markets.

Moving the neighborhood. Not the city, the neighborhood. Two subway stops out is routinely 30 percent off in most major cities.

Moving the property tier. International 5-star hotels average about 23 percent below US 5-star rates, which is why the same budget goes so much further abroad.

Recovering part of the spend. Rewards filter usage being up more than 800 percent says travelers have caught on that the sticker price is not the final price if something comes back to you.

That last one is the whole reason Best exists. Ten percent back on the room means a 1,400 dollar week of hotels returns 140 dollars. It does not require moving your dates, downgrading your room, or staying somewhere worse. It is the version of optimization that costs you nothing in trip quality.

The part of this that should worry the industry

A market where 88 percent of people keep traveling through a price increase looks healthy from the revenue side. Rates hold, occupancy holds, everyone reports a decent quarter.

But 52 percent adjusting their plans is a lot of behavioral change to absorb, and it does not show up in a revenue report until it does. Shorter stays hit food and beverage before they hit room revenue. Neighborhood substitution hits specific properties, not the market average. Budget filtering pushes demand toward the bottom of the rate ladder while the top of it stays full, which is exactly the RevPAR split we flagged earlier this year.

Luxury is pacing more than 20 percent ahead of last year. The middle is where the adjusting is happening.

Where the adjusting is showing up first

Three markets are absorbing most of the substitution, and they look nothing alike.

Length of stay. The clearest early indicator is trips getting shorter rather than fewer. A five-night stay becoming four is a 20 percent cut to lodging spend that never registers as a lost booking. Hotels see it as a slightly softer occupancy curve on the back half of the week.

Star tier within the same city. Travelers are not abandoning destinations. They are moving one notch down the rate ladder inside them, or one neighborhood out from the center. Both look like healthy demand in aggregate and like a problem if you happen to own the property they moved out of.

Included extras. The 800 percent jump in rewards-filter usage and the surge in budget filtering both point the same direction. People are optimizing the total, not the nightly rate, which means fees, breakfast, and parking now move bookings in a way they did not three years ago.

Regional divergence makes the picture messier still. Asia and the Middle East ran about 9 percent higher on average hotel prices in the first half of 2026. Oceania ran roughly 11 percent lower over the same window. A traveler optimizing across regions rather than within one has more room to move than the headline inflation number suggests.

The pattern behind this did not start in 2026

Trading down first showed up meaningfully in 2023, when the post-pandemic surge collided with the first serious round of rate increases. What changed since is that the tools got better and the behavior got normal.

Budget and rewards filters existed five years ago and almost nobody used them. Now they are the first click for a large share of searches. Price comparison used to take a browser with six tabs and now it takes one. The friction that made optimization the province of a small group of dedicated travelers has largely been removed, which is the simplest explanation for why the optimization rate sits near 50 percent across every income band.

That is the structural shift worth paying attention to. It is not that travelers got poorer. It is that comparison got free.

What to do with this if you are just trying to book a trip

Stop waiting for prices to fall. The demand data says they are not going to, at least not because people stopped traveling.

Spend your effort on the substitutions that do not cost you anything. Different night of the week, different neighborhood, tighter booking window, cashback on the spend. Those four moves stack, and together they routinely take 25 to 35 percent off a trip without changing what the trip is.

Save the actual trade-downs for when you need them. Most people reach for the worse hotel first and the smarter booking second. The data suggests high earners have figured out to do it the other way around.

Questions about the 2026 travel spending data

Are people canceling trips because of high travel prices in 2026? Almost no one. Skift State of Travel 2026 found just 1 percent planning to postpone or cancel and 9 percent planning to travel less. The dominant response, at 52 percent, is adjusting the trip rather than dropping it.

Are hotel prices going down in 2026? Not broadly. US hotel and motel rates are up roughly 2.6 percent year over year. Individual markets diverge sharply, with Asia and the Middle East up around 9 percent in the first half of 2026 and Oceania down about 11 percent.

What does trading down mean in travel? Choosing a cheaper version of the trip, a lower hotel tier, a shorter stay, a closer destination. Skift found 11 percent of travelers under 50,000 dollars in household income doing it, against 4 percent of those above 150,000.

What is the cheapest way to book a hotel right now? Book 8 to 14 days out for domestic stays, arrive on a Sunday where you can, look one neighborhood out from the center, and use a cashback booking platform so part of the spend comes back. Those moves compound.

Images: Airport and wallet images sourced from Pixabay. Airline lounge photograph by J o via Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons license.