July 16, 2026
Second-quarter bank earnings show travelers absorbed this summer’s surge in trip costs rather than canceling, even as lower-income households trade down.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo reported second-quarter 2026 results on July 14, and each posted card spending growth between 9% and 12%. The same summer, Squaremouth reported the average trip cost among travelers insuring through its marketplace climbed 24% to $9,668, and Deloitte’s summer travel survey found travelers expect to spend $4,069 on their longest trip, up 17%.
Squaremouth’s survey found that only 24% of Americans say they are spending more due to price increases alone. The rest are spending more on premium or bucket-list experiences or on additional trips, and 53% of Americans are cutting back on other expenses, such as dining out, shopping, and home improvements, to fund travel this year. Travel is the protected line item, and everything around it gets cut first.
The bank data adds two more things attractions should know: consumers are still paying their bills, and the banks themselves disagree about which consumers are spending.
The Numbers
All figures are for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and are preliminary pending each bank’s 10-Q.
JPMorgan’s combined debit and credit volume was $535.8 billion, also up 10%, and the bank posted record revenue in every line of business.
Credit quality improved alongside the spending, which is the part that matters for anyone worried this is a debt-fueled binge about to snap. JPMorgan’s card charge-off rate of 3.34% improved from 3.47% the prior quarter, and the bank cut its full-year charge-off guidance to 3.2% from 3.4%. Bank of America’s consumer card charge-off rate improved to 3.55%. Wells Fargo’s provision for credit losses fell 9%. CFO Jeremy Barnum said delinquencies came in “a little lower than we expected.” If consumer stress were spreading, delinquencies would rise before spending fell, because people keep swiping right up until they can’t pay. The banks are seeing the opposite. Whatever slowdown comes for the fall season, it is unlikely to arrive as a sudden credit shock in the next quarter.
Which Consumer Is Spending? The K-Shaped Economy Debate
The banks appear to disagree about the ‘K-Shaped Economy,’ until you look at their customer bases. Barnum told analysts that consumer spending was “robust across income segments” and that JPMorgan’s internal data does not support a broad K-shaped view of the consumer. That puts the country’s largest bank at odds with Delta Air Lines, whose CEO said four days earlier that Delta caters to higher-income customers “in the K-shaped economy,” and with Bank of America’s own research arm. The New York Fed said on its May 12 household debt call that it sees a K-shaped pattern in credit card balances, with weakness concentrated among lower-income and subprime borrowers.
I think that both sides are describing their own customers accurately. JPMorgan and Bank of America card books skew toward prime borrowers, meaning borrowers with strong credit scores, which skews higher income. An issuer looking at that portfolio would see resilience, as it holds households that were always going to be fine. The weakness the NY Fed describes lives disproportionately outside those books. Even Citi’s own report shows the split: branded card spending rose 12%, while private-label spending, which skews toward lower-income households and store credit, fell about 5%.
When a bank headline says consumers are strong, that verdict is rendered on prime customers. If your gate skews value guests, the headline is describing someone else’s customer. Barnum himself flagged households with negative real wage growth, meaning wages rising more slowly than prices, as a watch item. That group is the same population showing up in the NY Fed data and the survey below.
The 40% Who Aren’t Traveling, and Where They Might Go Instead
The Bank of America Institute reported on May 13 that nearly 40% of lower-income households had no summer travel plans, and that their travel-related card spending was down year-over-year through April. One caution before you read that as bad news: the survey does not define what counts as travel, and surveys like this almost certainly mean trips and vacations, not a day at a nearby park. Those households did not stop buying entertainment. They stopped buying travel.
Their entertainment budget didn’t vanish. It got smaller and stayed local, and that is exactly the guest the regional pass strategy exists to catch. The same trade-down shows up in flying. TSA expected to screen nearly 18.7 million travelers over the July 4th holiday week, so headline travel volume is holding, but ultra-low-cost carrier capacity is down roughly 30%. The value traveler didn’t disappear. They got priced out of flying or pushed into the car, while the mix of who was flying skewed toward the affluent. Read that way, the 40% figure is arguably a demand signal for regional attractions rather than against them.
What Operators Should Do With This
First, the most recent attractions’ earnings all predate the bank earnings, so the data is incomplete. Disney’s fiscal Q2 showed domestic attendance down 1% with per caps up 5%, United Parks posted Q1 attendance down 5% with record in-park per caps of $40.62, and Six Flags grew Q1 per capita spending 6%. All of that is winter and spring data. Parks do not report the quarter that overlaps the bank data until late July and August, so connecting July card volumes to attraction gates is an inference right now, not confirmation.
With that stated, the bank data supports a few assumptions. Demand into fall is not facing an imminent credit shock, so pricing already set for the fall season is not swimming against a debt cliff. Destination properties should expect the fewer-but-richer mix to continue, which is the demand that premium tiers, VIP tours, and reserved access are built on, and locals cannot fully substitute for a missing fly-in guest at the same spend. Regional properties are positioned to catch the trade-down guest, and the 40% figure describes the size of that pool.
Three dates will test all of this. American Express reports July 24, and is the cleanest read on the affluent traveler. The Fed’s next consumer credit release lands on August 7 and will show whether May’s dip in revolving credit was noise or the start of a borrowing slowdown. Then the Q2 park earnings arrive as the first operator data covering the same window as the banks.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called the current environment “close to as good as it gets” on the call, while cautioning about how long it lasts. After Disney’s Q2, I wrote that how long premium consumers keep spending is an open question until the stock market takes a bigger hit. None of this changes the plan I have been describing since Delta and Disney reported. Build for segments, not for an average consumer, because the average consumer is a statistical artifact of two groups moving in opposite directions. The premium guest is still trading up, and premium tiers, VIP tours, and reserved access are available to capture them. The value guest is trading down instead of out, and pass products and local pricing are in place to catch them. The banks just told us both guests are still spending. The question your fall plan has to answer is which one you are built for, and whether you would know if that changed.
