Travel’s Wallet Share Reckoning Is Here

This is first of three columns based on 2025 credit card data spend and what it means for travel spending.

The U.S. travel industry has a preferred narrative for 2026: “resilience” (a wildly overused word). And yes, TSA keeps setting records, airlines are still flying full planes, and demand remains robust.

But three independent signals from U.S. credit card issuers point to the same pressure: Travel is losing wallet share.

The Data Convergence

Citizens Bank published its December credit-card tracker last week. The headline finding is that travel’s share of consumer wallets shrank from 12% in January 2024 to 8% by December 2025. That’s a loss of four percentage points in travel’s wallet share in just two years.

Travel spending is still growing, but at a much slower pace than overall spending: 4% versus 8.1%. When you’re growing at half the rate of everything else