How Summer Travel Is Changing

WSJ What’s News

The Wall Street Journal

News, Daily News

4 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are in the heat of the summer travel season, and many travelers are finding that it’s getting more expensive to take a vacation. Airlines, whose hopes for this year were rattled by tariff uncertainty, have started adapting to more upscale consumers; Southwest, for example, has adopted new bag fees and started selling tickets with assigned seats. Hotels are seeing a decline in foreign visitors as domestic travelers scale back their plans, even as short term rental services like Airbnb are broadening their offerings to include services. Allison Pohle covers travel and tourism for the Wall Street Journal, and she joins host Alex Ossola to discuss how travel is looking different these days, and what this means for travel in the future. Further Reading: Europe Is Out. Road Trips Are In. Welcome to the Scaled-Back Vacation. Airlines Are Having a Bruising Year. Delta and United Are Doing Better. New York City’s Hotel Market Is Envy of the Country Airbnb Lets You Add a Private Chef to Your Rental. Your Host Might Not Like It. Where Did All the Las Vegas Tippers Go? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Omada Health makes managing chronic conditions easier by supporting members between doctors' visits.
0:05.4	Members are paired with the health coach empowered by insights from smart devices and AI-powered tools.
0:10.6	Learn more at OmadaHealth.com. Omada Health is proudly NASDAQ listed.
0:17.0	Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, August 3rd. I'm Alex Osala for the Wall Street Journal.
0:22.7	This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news
0:27.7	by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
0:32.6	On today's show, many Americans may have been looking forward to their summer vacation all year, only
0:38.1	to find that it's just way more expensive than they expected.
0:42.0	Everyone from airlines to hotels are catering to more high-end consumers, so vacationers
0:47.3	went looking for cheaper options.
0:49.5	Today, we're talking about how the world of travel is changing and whether our current
0:53.3	moment is ushering in a new normal.
0:57.1	Baggage fees, seat selection fees, cleaning fees. It's true. Travel is getting more expensive.
1:04.0	How is that changing the future of travel? To discuss, I'm joined by Alison Polly. She's not only fresh off a vacation of her own, but she also
1:12.8	covers travel and tourism for the journal. Allison, going into this summer, how are people
1:18.1	thinking about their vacations? If you go back to this winter, people were really optimistic
1:23.3	about vacations that they would be taking, and then things started to get a little bit murkier.
1:29.1	So we had news about tariffs. There was economic uncertainty. The data was complicated and it was
1:36.0	tough to get a clear picture of what people were actually doing. But we knew that they did want to
1:41.3	travel. They might just change some of their plans. So for example, if they already had a trip booked, they were probably going to go on it.
1:48.9	They probably weren't going to straight up cancel a vacation for the summer, but they might cancel one for later in the year.
1:55.6	People were not flying as much domestically, but they were still flying internationally. Maybe they were
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