International travel has gotten a lot more expensive over the past few years. I'm literally paying double for the same flight and hotel compared to 5-6 years ago.
They belong to a privileged class. They might be able to afford vastly more expensive luxuries like a roof over their head that belongs to them and healthcare too.
I think a weekend trip for two (including housing) is on the order of a months rent: roughly $1500.
Staying at home is also increasingly unaffordable for a lot of people in the United States, of course.
1) rent/mortgage
2) food
And you still have to pay both of those if you're on vacation. Unless you're suggesting that people pack up everything they own, move out of their house, and go on vacation for a month?
Of course it varies from household to household whether it's practical (or wise) to do this.
I did it too.
If youre the kind of person who flits between luxury airbnbs and cruises then yeah, "travel is a luxury".
There seem to be a fair few of those here.
It's going to cost over $10k, and most of that is going to flights (economy) and hotels (decent, but not stellar).
A very large percentage of Americans wouldn't even be able to afford the ~$1k/person to fly to Europe, let alone any of the other costs involved.
If you think that every American (or even nearly so) would be able to afford an overseas vacation if they just did the research, then I'm sorry, you really are out of touch with reality. Hell, a depressing number of Americans don't even have enough paid days off to be able to afford to take a road-trip-and-camping vacation within the country for any significant length of time.
I mean flown somewhat routinely and "recreationally" not for work, school, or emergency. I think 30% is probably about right with those constraints? Among tech people everyone has flown several times at least, but a lot of my family and social connections are inner city working class and many of them have never flown except possibly when a family member was hospitalized. Others fondly recall the single trip they took to florida or whatever decades ago.
A lot of americans don't fly ever and it's definitely for financial reasons even though tickets can be very cheap. The flight is the cheapest part of a vacation and people making $30k at hourly labor are just not taking time off work to fly to new places.
I think it makes sense that there's some X% of Americans who fly "recreationally somewhat routinely" where X<100, but I'm not sure what X is. As a counterpoint to X=30, as of last Fall 48% of Americans had a passport [1] from which I think we can reasonably infer that nearly 48% of Americans have had an international trip in the last 10 years. The bar for recreationally flying in general is quite lower because it includes domestic flights. But also maybe the international trip was a once off.
[1] https://www.state.gov/return-to-pre-pandemic-passport-proces...
It's unlike necessities like a roof over your head, education and healthcare. These are all increasingly unaffordable thanks to a war on the working class driven by the financialization of essentials.