47% of Americans Just Scaled Back Summer Travel — and the Money Went to Groceries

There’s a version of the “Americans are cutting back on travel” story that gets told every few years, and it’s usually about trading down: skipping the trip, buying a couch instead. This year’s version is different, and the difference is the whole story.

A new Omnisend survey of 1,075 U.S. consumers, conducted by Cint in June 2026, found that nearly half — 47% — postponed, shortened, downgraded, or entirely canceled a summer trip because of cost. That part is expected.

Here’s the part that isn’t. Among those spending less on travel, 47% say the money is going to groceries. 28% are putting it toward rent or mortgage. 23% are using it to pay down debt. Twenty-nine percent simply say they need it for essentials.

Marty Bauer, an ecommerce expert at Omnisend, names it plainly:

“There was a time when skipping or downgrading a vacation might have meant spending that money on a home renovation or new furniture. Today, that’s increasingly not the case. Before families decide where they want to go, they’re deciding whether that money would be better spent putting food on the table, staying on top of bills or paying down debt.”

That’s not a travel story. That’s a household budget story that happens to show up in the travel data first, because travel is the most cuttable thing most families own.

The Shape of the Pullback

The survey found 59% of Americans have travel plans this summer — but only 17% are taking a major trip involving flights or paid lodging. The rest have adapted downward:

• 21% are taking a shorter or cheaper trip than originally planned
• 20% are sticking to day trips or local outings
• 14% are staying home altogether

And the culprits, among those who scaled back:

• Gas prices — 46%
• Groceries and everyday bills — 29%
• Hotel or vacation rental costs — 24%
• Food costs while traveling — 18%

Notice what’s at the top. It’s not hotels. It’s gas — the expense you pay every week whether or not you’re going anywhere. The vacation didn’t get too expensive in isolation. It got outbid by ordinary life.

Bauer’s framing again: “A vacation budget no longer exists in isolation — it’s competing with higher fuel costs, grocery bills and other everyday expenses that have become harder to ignore.”

Two Surveys, One Squeeze

Read this next to Squaremouth’s report from this week and the pincer becomes obvious. Squaremouth puts the average 2026 summer trip at a record $9,032 — up 17% year over year, and found 88% of travelers making at least one money-saving adjustment to keep their plans alive.

So: trips cost 17% more, groceries and gas are eating the money that would have paid for them, and the response is nearly universal adaptation. Almost nobody’s opting out entirely — 59% still have plans. They’re just doing it differently, on less, under pressure from both directions.

“Americans aren’t giving up on summer,” Bauer says. “They’re giving up on the idea that a memorable vacation has to involve flights, hotels, or a hefty price tag.”

That’s a good instinct. It’s also a lot harder to execute than it sounds.

Cheaper Trips Break Budgets Too

Here’s the trap in a scaled-back trip: it feels pre-optimized. You already made the sacrifice. You’re driving instead of flying, staying two nights instead of five, going to the lake instead of the coast. The hard part is over — so the trip doesn’t get a budget, because how much could it possibly cost?

Then it costs more than you expected. Gas both ways, plus the stop on the way. Meals out because you’re not at home. The activity that seemed cheap until it was four tickets. A shorter trip has fewer big line items and more of the small unbudgeted ones — and unbudgeted is the operative word, because a category you never estimated can’t be over.

This matters especially for the 23% redirecting travel money toward debt. If a scaled-back trip quietly overshoots and lands on a card, the entire point evaporates — you cut the vacation to pay down debt and created debt doing it. That’s not hypothetical: NerdWallet found 35% of last summer’s card-paying travelers still hadn’t cleared the balance a year later, at an average 22.3% interest.

The households in this survey are making genuinely hard calls — groceries over a beach week. Those calls deserve to actually work.

What Makes a Scaled-Back Trip Land

The method is the same whether the trip is $9,000 or $400. It just matters more at $400, because there’s no slack.

Start with the ceiling, not the trip. Decide what you can spend without financing it. Write it down. Build the trip inside that number instead of pricing a trip and then asking whether you can afford it — by that point you’re already committed, and “we’ll make it work” is how the card comes out.

Price the big rocks first. Even on a road trip, transportation and lodging are 45–50% of the budget. Get real numbers — actual gas math for the actual distance, actual nightly rate including the fees the listing hides. Comparison here beats discipline everywhere else.

Convert the rest into a daily number. Subtract the big rocks from your ceiling, divide by the days. That’s the only number you can use in the moment. “We have $600 for this trip” is unusable at a gas station. “We have $85 a day and yesterday was $120” isn’t.

Track as you go, not after. This is the entire mechanism. If food is at 70% of budget on day two of four, you find out on day two — pack lunches, done, trip lands on target. Find out from the statement and your only remaining lever is interest.

Don’t skip the categories you think are too small to matter. On a cheap trip they’re most of the trip. Gas, parking, snacks, one activity, one meal out — that is the budget.

A travel budget planner spreadsheet does this for a weekend road trip as readily as for a two-week international one: set the ceiling, break it across nine categories, log expenses from your phone as you spend, and watch the green/yellow/red flags tell you which category needs a decision today. It handles up to five trips in one file, which is closer to how this year actually looks for most people — a few small ones instead of one big one.

The Real Headline

The number that should stick isn’t 47%. It’s that nearly half of the people who cut back on travel put the money into groceries.

That’s a lot of families making a genuinely unpleasant trade, deliberately, and mostly getting it right. The only thing worth adding is this: a trade like that is worth protecting. Make the smaller trip actually cost what you decided it would, and the sacrifice buys what it was supposed to buy — instead of quietly ending up on a card, where it costs 22.3% more than the trip you gave up in the first place.