Shadowing Practice: The End Of Budget Tourism - Learn English Speaking with Video
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After declaring bankruptcy in 2024 and then again in 2025,
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2026 finally finished things off as Spirit Airlines shut down entirely about three weeks ago now, following their failure to secure a last-minute government bailout.
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Now, this particular business closure wasn't exactly shocking to anybody that had actually been following the company,
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but the end of this otherwise unremarkable low-cost carrier might be both the indication of
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and the cause of a wider reversal across the entire travel industry.
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The last three decades in particular have been the golden age of budget tourism,
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with most significant travel-related expenses like airfares and accommodation lagging behind overall inflation to become significantly cheaper in real terms.
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For a lot of people, this was a very real lifestyle reprieve to offset a lot of other financial challenges.
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Sure, they may never be able to afford a home and their career may be increasingly precarious compared to their parents.
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But even a basic income, potentially mixed in with a little bit of new-age consumer debt,
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could let people see the world in a way that was genuinely reserved for the jet set just a generation before.
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According to the booking company Going, this time last year was the second cheapest month on record for airfares,
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which they noted in the report was unlikely to change unless there were any major shocks in 2026.
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So um, yeah.
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Anyway, the reality today is there are several headwinds
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that are all pushing back against the trend of budget friendly travel
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and increased fuel costs are just one small part of the puzzle.
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The closure of Spirit may be equally the result of their own poor practices mixed in with unfavorable market conditions, but no matter where the finger is eventually pointed,
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without their low-cost seats in the market, regular airlines have much less pressure to be competitive on their prices,
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which is a dynamic playing out in far more places than just this one specific example.
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Travel related expenses are up by 20% year over year,
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and this was already happening before we started making a distraction in Iran.
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Drivers nationwide are fretting over increasing gas prices and now airlines say they are feeling the pinch.
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Delta CEO said that jet fuel prices have increased dramatically since the war in Iran broke out.
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More hotels are charging $1,000 or more a night.
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Daniel Jacobs with True Loan Mortgage saying while inflation is on the decline, hotels and Airbnb prices are skyrocketing.
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The shutdown was abrupt to many passengers, but this was really years in the making.
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Spirit was in bankruptcy, it had filed for bankruptcy twice within one year.
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Okay, so travel has been getting more expensive across the board, and the easy explanation is that, well, everything is getting more expensive in 2026.
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Now fuel prices are something that is clearly worth addressing, but even before the conflict in Iran, travel-related costs were already increasing,
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and they were increasing faster than overall inflation after an otherwise long period of pretty consistently getting more affordable.
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Now, even though it would probably make for a much more compelling video, there is not a single silver bullet that explains why this has been happening.
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Instead, there are a few headwinds that all need to be considered independently and collectively.
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And then of course, they will make a lot more sense when we sprinkle the oil prices back into the equation.
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Okay, so the first big factor is that the travel industry has been stratifying itself for a long time now.
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But the last few years in particular have taken it to such an extreme
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that it is having a meaningful impact on budget travelers.
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The most obvious example of this is what happened to airline cabins.
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The standard for most of the last 30 years has been economy for budget-conscious tourists,
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business for well, mostly business people who didn't need to pay out of their own dime, and whose companies were happy to pay for them to arrive at a destination more ready to get work done,
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and ultimately some airlines that offered firsts for very wealthy travelers who wanted a luxurious experience above
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and beyond just the comfort of business.
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With just a pinch of dynamic pricing and good ol' hidden fees, this model captured an overwhelming share of the market and aviation spend.
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Today, the average international flight has something closer to six individual classes you can choose from.
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Budget Airlines, regular economy, premium economy, business class, first class, high-end first class suites like those offered by Singapore or Qatar Airlines,
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and then increasingly the private jet market sitting on top of all of that through services like NetJets, VistaJet, and, uh, Linus's creative accounting.
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In just a perfect encapsulation of this issue, private jet charter companies have been struggling to keep up with demand at the same time as budget airlines are closing down.
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The same thing is happening across hotels, cruises, restaurants, and basically every travel experience that can be sliced into a class system.
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Cruise ships are potentially an even more extreme version of this.
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Cruises were initially pitched as one of the most cost-effective ways to take a vacation
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because the food and the cabin were all-inclusive, so your total spend was basically locked in from the moment you booked.
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Today, the fastest-growing segment of the cruise market is ultra-premium yachts co-branded with high-end hotels like Four Seasons,
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Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, and Amman with cabins that can run up to a quarter of a million dollars per week.
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Investment into this end of the market has been enormous, largely driven by private equity firms who have clocked which way the K-shaped economy has been bending.
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Now I think it's probably worth mentioning that this does not mean that they are immune from their own incentivification.
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Some of the initial reviews of these ultra high-end cruise ships have been hilariously bad.
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Anyway, all of this by itself shouldn't really be a problem for budget travelers.
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If the top half of the K wants to spend more on increasingly ridiculous accommodations
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while most people enjoy budget prices for budget service, well, let them eat moldy cake.
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If anything, the rise of budget airlines has been one of the great consumer wins of the last 30 years.
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An aggressive low-cost competition has dragged regular economy prices down with it.
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The problem is that the low end of this market is now under enormous pressure, and as those budget options dry up, the dynamics of the whole market start to change.
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The clearest example of this is Spirit.
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With Spirit gone from the market, regular airlines
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that used to compete with their fares on the same routes suddenly have much less pressure to keep their own prices low.
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They don't even have to do anything sinister to take advantage of this.
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They just simply don't have to discount as aggressively as they used to.
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On the other end, major carriers are also figuring out
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that they can make a lot more money per square foot of cabin by ripping out rows of economy seats
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and replacing them with premium economy or business class seats with relative confidence they will be filled consistently.
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Lifthansa has been openly bragging that premium economy generates around 33% more revenue per square foot than regular economy,
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and about 6% more than full business class.
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For a business just trying to maximize revenue, why sell 10 economy seats to budget travelers
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when you could sell 4 premium economy seats for more money
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to people whose portfolios have done very well over the last few years?
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The demand for those premium seats is genuinely there, so they would be kind of dumb not to displace the budget travelers.
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Oh, and even airlines that do want to add more economy capacity kind of can't right now.
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The aircraft production pipeline is a complete mess.
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As of April 2026, Boeing and Airbus are sitting on a combined backlog of more than 12,000 narrow-body planes,
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with Airbus' backlog alone representing roughly 10 years of production at current delivery rates.
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Engine supply has become the binding constraint on the entire global narrowbody market, with LEAP engines from CFM International which power both the A320neo
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and the 737 MAX effectively setting the upper limit on how many new planes anyone can put in the air.
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Which means even if a low cost carrier wanted to step into Spirit's empty routes tomorrow with brand new fuel efficient planes, those planes are not available, possibly for years.
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All of this to say
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that just as something like Spirit Airlines dragged down costs on the routes they flew from the budget end of the market,
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the draw of premium seats is pulling prices up as more space gets allocated to higher revenue seats, so when Spirit exited the market,
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the only remaining forces are all in one direction.
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Now, to be fair, a lot of former Spirit planes will be de-yellowed and released out there to other airlines, but those are unlikely to be focused on the bottom end of the market.
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With such constrained supply, the existing fleet gets allocated to whichever routes and cabin configurations maximize revenue,
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and right now, that is just serving the creamiest markets of premium economy and business class.
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It's not great, but this alone is far from the biggest reason why your next vacation may be in the metaverse.
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So it's time to learn how money works to find out if the golden age of cheap travel really is over.
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Check it out using the link in my description.
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Okay, the second major factor is what Airbnb has done to the accommodation market when you actually arrive.
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When Airbnb first showed up about 15 years ago, it was sold as a low-cost, no-frills alternative to a hotel, often with the host actually living in the property alongside the guests.
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Of course, over time, it too became premium focused, with most properties being rented out without the host actually cohabitating or really even being present at all.
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Landlords figured out that displacing their tenants to convert their properties into pseudo hotels gave them a slightly higher rental yield, and that's all they really needed to know.
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Now, eventually, cities started cracking down on this as housing
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and tourist hotspots became catastrophically unaffordable for the people who would actually be supporting the tourists.
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And as this happened, Airbnb itself started leaning into quality listings, so the cheap end of the platform basically evaporated.
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Airbnb's own Q4 2025 results show they removed 550,000 low-quality listings between 2023 and the end of 2025,
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and that listings flagged as guest favorites now accounted for nearly half of all bookings on the platform.
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What that means is that the accommodations that survived this cleanup were largely already operating like hotels, while everything else got pressured to either move upscale or go out of business.
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Now we covered the Airbnb bust on this channel a couple of years ago, but what we didn't mention was the impact that this platform had on hostels,
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which used to be the bedrock of really affordable international travel.
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During the golden years where VC subsidized just about everything, a lot of backpackers opted to split a whole Airbnb between a group of friends over sharing a hostel dorm with strangers,
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and then COVID pretty much finished off whatever demand was left for this kind of cheap and cheerful shared accommodation.
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The cumulative result is that the budget end of the global accommodation market has basically been hollowed out.
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New York is probably the cleanest case study of this.
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NYC enforced local law 18 in 2023 to crack down on short-term rentals, and the results have been kind of remarkable.
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Airbnb listings citywide dropped from around $38,500 to roughly $5,000, a 92% decline.
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Outer borough listings Brooklyn, Queens, and the bronx dropped from around 17 000 to about 1400
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over the same window the 12-month average nightly rate for a
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hotel room in new york city has hit a record 320
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dollars with hotel prices in the city up 12.6 percent over the last two years
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which is more than triple the national rate of hotel price increases now hopefully it should go without saying
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that the need for people to be able to afford to
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live in their own city should outweigh the need for tourists to enjoy a cheap hotel room
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but unfortunately the damage was largely already done
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and none of this made new york more livable to live
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in what did change was who got to visit the city the neighborhoods
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that used to host the cheaper airbnb capacity places like crown heights astoria
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and the south bronx reportedly saw drops of up to 70 in foot traffic
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which has hit the local restaurants and small businesses
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that depend on tourist spending so that crackdown effectively just routed budget travelers out of the city entirely,
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while higher spenders who could afford a Manhattan hotel kept coming.
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And while New York is the most extreme example, the same logic is playing out at the city level across most of the major tourist destinations in Europe too.
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Venice now charges day visitors between 5 and 10 euros to enter the city on peak days, with the higher rate kicking in if you book closer to the date.
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Over 720,000 day visitors paid the fee between April and July 2025 alone.
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Barcelona has bumped its tourist tax to 4 euros a night, and the total nightly tax on a higher-end hotel can approach 15 euros once city and regional fees stack up.
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And Amsterdam is capping cruise traffic to 100 ships in 2026, down from 190 before banning them outright by 2035.
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Now individually, none of these fees are devastating even to the most budget-conscious backpacker,
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but they do raise the bar in such a way that they can have knock-on impacts across an entire city.
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If you are visiting Venice for the day with a backpack full of borrowed condiments for sustenance, a couple extra euros a day is a consideration.
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Hypothetically, of course.
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I've never done this.
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But anyway, if you are spending three nights in the Amman, the fee is a rounding error.
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This gradually means that fewer budget and more high-end travelers will accumulate in the centers,
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which means hotels and restaurants will naturally start accommodating to higher-end clientele, which gradually just makes the entire city a more expensive destination.
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Now to play devil's advocate a bit here, to a lot of city centers that have been somewhat overrun by revenge travelers, this is kind of the point.
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One wealthy couple who spends 30 grand on a week in
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the city is providing just as much economic value as a thousand backpackers spending 30 bucks each
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while creating far less disturbance to the locals.
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Then of course, the third factor is the one that gets most of the headlines, and that is oil.
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Yeah, okay, this one is fairly obvious, so I will just get to the point.
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Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the start of the
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war neuron with north american jet fuel up around 95 from about 2.50 a gallon to around 4.56
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the international energy agency has actually called the disruption through the
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straight of hermuz the largest supply disruption in the history of
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the global oil market the relevant thing for our purposes is
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how those costs get distributed the marginal cost of fuel in
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a ten thousand dollar business class seat might be an extra five hundred dollars not nothing
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but but the kind of customer paying 10 grand for a flatbed is not going to notice the difference.
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A $700 budget airline ticket getting hit with a $100 fuel surcharge is statistically a much bigger deal.
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And the carriers are pretty open about this.
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Spirit literally cited jet fuel doubling in two months as a major reason why they couldn't make their March restructuring plan work.
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And they pointed to fuel costs explicitly when they shut down operations earlier this month.
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So you can see how the oil shock just gets layered on top of the existing premiumization problem.
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Premium airlines and premium routes can absorb a fuel spike, where thin margin budget carriers on already cheap routes just can't.
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The fourth and final headwind doesn't get talked about much in the travel context, but it does a lot of the heavy lifting.
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And that is what is happening to the US dollar.
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For most of the last decade, Americans have been able to lean on a strong dollar to get genuinely cheap overseas vacations.
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That was especially true in places like Japan, where a weakening yen meant an American on a basic salary could spend a week living large, effectively subsidized by the petrodollar.
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The problem is that when you flood a destination with relatively wealthy dollar tourists, hotels and airlines slowly adjust their prices upwards to capture all that demand.
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A Tokyo hotel in 2026 is not the same bargain it was in 2022.
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And now the dynamic is going the other way.
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The US dollar index has been trading around 97 to 99 through May 2026, well off its record peaks,
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and Cambridge currencies is currently forecasting it to drift down towards 90 to 96 by the back end of the year.
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The Federal Reserve's own research on exchange rate elasticities of international tourism makes this pretty intuitive.
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When the dollar weakens, American outbound travel just gets more expensive in real terms, even when the local currency prices on the destination haven't moved at all.
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And once again, this hits different parts of the market very differently.
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People earning a salary can simply afford less vacation for the same dollar amount, even if the foreign prices haven't moved.
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And anyone who needs to top up their trip with a personal loan is doing
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so at an interest rate pretty much double what they were four years ago.
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People who are already wealthier in asset terms, like stock portfolios and property, have largely had any dollar weakness offset by their asset gains,
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and the strong stock market has actually made them more comfortable spending on travel, not less.
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Now I just want to quickly mention
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that a smaller channel by the name of Analyzing Finance with
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Nick actually made a great video on this dynamic a few weeks ago.
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He is very straight to the point
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but he has done a lot of good deep dives on different topics and is definitely worth checking out.
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Now in real terms, travel is still cheaper than it was 20 years ago.
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And again, just for a bit of perspective, June 2025 was the second cheapest month for airfares on record.
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But there is no hard and fast rule that says this has to remain true.
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And for what it's worth, cheap travel was kind of the one consolation prize for a generation
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that mostly missed out on the other big consumer wins of the last 50 years.
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They might not have got the same shot at home ownership their parents did, their careers are more precarious, their student debt is heavier in real terms,
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and they have lived through three major recessions.
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But the one consolation prize they did get, being able to fly anywhere for cheap, is now potentially also drying up.
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But from the market's point of view, this is all working exactly as intended.
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And if you want further proof of that, go and watch this video next to find out how the future became someone else's problem.
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And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The End Of Budget Tourism”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: budget, airline, hotel, price, travel. This video has 206 sentences and 3500 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:58. The speaker talks fast, about 184 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| airline noun | /ˈɛɹˌlaɪn/ | A company that flies airplanes to transport people and goods. |
| accommodation noun | /əˌkɒm.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/ | Lodging in a dwelling or similar living quarters afforded to travellers in hotels or on cruise ships, or students, etc. |
| cabin noun | /ˈkæbɪn/ | A small dwelling characteristic of the frontier, especially when built from logs with simple tools and not constructed by professional builders, but by those… |
| euro noun | /ˈjʊɹoʊ/ | The currency unit of the European Monetary Union. Symbol: € |
| airfare noun | The cost or expense of an airplane ticket or trip. | |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| bankruptcy noun | /ˈbæŋkˌɹʌp(t).si/ | A legally declared or recognized condition of insolvency of a person or organization. |
| inflation noun | /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/ | An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid. |
| allocate verb | /ˈæl.ə.keɪt/ | To set aside for a purpose. |
| backlog noun | /ˈbæk(ˌ)lɔɡ/ | A large log to burn at the back of a fire. |
| backpacker noun | A traveler whose luggage consists of a backpack; especially, such a traveler who uses hostels, public transport, and other inexpensive services. | |
| headwind verb | /ˈhɛdˌwɪnd/ | To blow directly against the course of a vehicle, like an aircraft, train, or ship. |
| nightly adverb | /ˈnaɪtli/ | Every night. |
| precarious adjective | /pɹɪˈkɛəɹi.əs/ | Dangerously insecure or unstable; perilous. |
| subsidize verb | /ˈsʌbsɪdaɪz/ | To assist (someone or something) by granting a subsidy. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| dry up verb | To become dry (often of weather); to lose water. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| shut down verb | To close, terminate, or end; to stop operating, either permanently or temporarily. | |
| break out verb | To escape, especially forcefully or defiantly. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| close down verb | /kləʊzˈdaʊn/ | To stop trading as a business. |
| drag down verb | To cause (other people or another person) to suffer the same fate, or to feel the same negative mood. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been getting · has been happening · has been stratifying |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to compete · used to be · used to host |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have been · have increased · have taken |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be considered · can be sliced · will be filled |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 15 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, can't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: accommodation /əˌkɒm.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, consolation /ˌkɑn.səˈleɪ.ʃən/, disruption /dɪsˈɹʌpʃən/, closure /ˈkloʊ.ʒɚ/
- Long words — get the stress right: accommodation /əˌkɒm.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, precarious /pɹɪˈkɛəɹi.əs/, consolation /ˌkɑn.səˈleɪ.ʃən/, intuitive /ɪnˈtjuːɪtɪv/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like airline, accommodation, cabin.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.