Travelling against the tide: Understanding the resilience of tourism spending amid middle-class economic constraints

Tourism has continued to expand even as middle-class households across major economies confront job losses, persistent inflation, and stagnant real wages. This viewpoint article argues that this pattern is best understood not as an anomaly but as an instance of resilience, a concept long used in tourism studies to describe a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance and continue functioning. Drawing on the tourism resilience literature alongside evidence on household trading-down behaviour, the growth of low-cost carriers, and behavioural drivers such as mental accounting and the enduring preference for experiences over possessions, the article traces how demand-side adaptation, rather than an absence of financial strain, explains today’s travel boom. It also considers the post-pandemic recalibration of travel priorities and the growing role of instalment-based financing in sustaining bookings. For local economies, this resilience offers a genuine opportunity to anchor tourism-linked employment and small business activity, but only if destinations build their own adaptive capacity around value-conscious, shorter, and more flexible travel formats rather than assuming demand will remain resilient indefinitely. The article closes with implications for local economic policy and planning.