There’s a version of the holidays you picture before you book anything — everyone at one table, nobody checking a banking app under the tablecloth. Then the calendar fills in with flights, a hotel for four nights, and a grandchild’s recital three states over, and the real trip starts looking nothing like that picture. A new AARP survey says you’re not imagining how much more it costs to get there this year.
Why the trip still happens even when the cost climbs
According to AARP’s 2026 holiday travel survey, released October 21 and based on a Foresight 50+ Omnibus poll of 1,023 adults conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, 67% of people 50 and older say being with family is still the main reason they travel over the holidays at all. Another 29% point to keeping a tradition alive — the same drive that gets you on a plane you’d rather skip, for a visit you can’t picture skipping either.
That’s the part that doesn’t change from year to year, and it’s worth sitting with before the dollar figures do their work on you. The reason hasn’t gotten smaller. The number attached to it has gotten bigger — and those are two different problems, even though they show up on the same credit card statement.
What this year’s AARP numbers actually say
The same AARP survey found that 43% of respondents expect to spend $2,000 or more getting to and through this year’s holidays — travel, gifts, food, the whole stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. That’s not a small-ticket number, and it’s not landing on people who are being careless with money. It’s landing on people doing the same math you’re doing, arriving at a bigger total than last year’s.
Thirty-seven percent told AARP they expect to spend more this year than they did last year. If that’s you, you’re not the outlier the number makes it sound like — you’re the plurality. The spending isn’t rising because people decided to go bigger. It’s rising because the same trip costs more than it did twelve months ago.
The one-in-five threshold that’s new this year
Here’s the figure that stands out in AARP’s release: nearly one in five respondents — 18% — say they expect to spend $5,000 or more this holiday season. That’s not a splurge trip to somewhere exotic. For a lot of people answering that survey, $5,000 is what it costs to get everyone to one table this year, full stop — flights for a few family members, a rental car, a few nights somewhere, groceries for a crowd.
If you ran your own numbers and landed somewhere near that figure, you weren’t overspending. You were pricing out the same trip your parents took for a third of that, a decade or two ago, in dollars that don’t buy what they used to. That gap between what the trip costs now and what it felt like it should cost is where most of the holiday dread actually lives.
Why a third of people are hosting instead of flying
One response shows up clearly in the data: 34% of respondents say they’re hosting the holiday at home this year rather than traveling to someone else’s. That’s not a retreat from the holiday — it’s a redirect. The people gathering around your table instead of someone else’s table is still the 67% reason showing up, just solved a different way.
If hosting is the move you’re making this year, you’re not settling for a smaller holiday. You’re choosing the version of “being with family” that doesn’t require a four-figure travel bill to get there. That’s a trade a lot of people are quietly making this year, and the survey suggests you have more company in it than it might feel like from your own kitchen.
Cost is the headline worry, and AARP’s numbers back that up
Fifty-two percent of respondents named cost as their single biggest holiday-season concern — not family tension, not travel delays, not the stress of hosting. Just the number at the bottom of the receipt. That’s worth naming plainly, because holiday stress gets talked about in terms of relatives and schedules far more often than in terms of what AARP’s own survey says is actually weighing on people most.
If cost is the part of this season sitting heaviest on you, you’re squarely in the majority this survey found, not the exception worrying more than she should. Naming it as the real source of the stress — instead of blaming yourself for dreading a trip you also genuinely want to take — is the first useful thing you can do with a number like 52%.
What to do with these numbers before you book anything else
None of this is a reason to cancel the trip or talk yourself out of the table you actually want to sit at. It’s a reason to stop treating the price tag as a personal failure when the survey says most people your age are looking at the same total. The cost went up. Your judgment didn’t get worse.
This isn’t about choosing between a smaller holiday and an affordable one — it’s about picking which of the two moves 34% of this year’s respondents already made: travel anyway, knowing what it costs, or host instead and let the number work in your favor for once. Either one still gets you to the thing 67% of people said they actually wanted in the first place.
You’re allowed to book the flight and feel the sticker shock at the same time — those two things aren’t in conflict, and neither one cancels out the other. Whatever this year’s total ends up being, you’re not the only one doing this math at the kitchen table tonight.