Recency Bias Is Travel’s Most Reliable Con

Every macro crisis in travel produces the same confident obituary, and almost every obituary turns out to be wrong.

I have been thinking about recency bias a lot lately — March 2026 feels a lot like March 2020 — not just as a business concept but as something closer to a universal cognitive failure. 

We are wired to over-index on the immediate, to mistake the present moment for the future, to assume that whatever disruption we are living through represents a permanent structural break. The pattern is so reliable it should be humbling. And yet we fall for it every single time, with the same breathless conviction, the same certainty that this time is different.

It never is.

And it almost always takes about three years, which seems to be how long it takes for the human brain to forget what it felt like to be afraid.

The Doom Forecasts

Let’s go through the evidence.

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, serious