At the international departures area of Tokyo’s Narita airport, the queue snaked past the immigration counters, a patient ribbon of travellers from Asia, North America, Europe and Australia. They were the final data points in a survey conducted throughout 2025 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which found that the average foreign visitor was now spending 199,874 yen – roughly 22 million Indonesian rupiah – per trip, a 9.6 per cent jump on the year before. Accommodation ate up the largest share, followed by souvenirs and then food and drink. Chinese tourists remained the biggest spenders, parting with an average of 267,757 yen each, even as their total outlay dipped 8.8 per cent. The queues at Narita, captured in a news photograph, were not a sign of a world uniformly on the move, but of a global leisure economy fracturing along new fault lines.

Viewed from Moscow, the picture was more sombre. Russia’s domestic tourism, which had grown 7 per cent in the first half of 2025, slipped into a 3 per cent decline in the same period of 2026, with total trips falling to 40.1 million, according to the Association of Tour Operators of Russia. The reasons were starkly material: in Crimea, a shortage of petrol kept motorists away, while unstable flight schedules – cancellations and delays – made planning a gamble. At the same time, high interest rates had nudged households towards a savings mentality, with spare cash flowing into deposits rather than hotel bookings. Yet the Russian traveller did not stay home entirely. In Tajikistan, the number of Russian visitors surged by a quarter to 175,800 in six months, and Vietnam welcomed 742,679 Russians, a 2.8-fold increase that pushed the country to third place among source markets, behind only China and South Korea. The outbound impulse was alive, but it was being channelled away from the Black Sea and towards Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

In Brazil, the services sector, a broad proxy for domestic consumption and leisure, offered its own cautionary tale. The volume of services contracted by 0.4 per cent in May from April, erasing part of the previous month’s 1.1 per cent gain and falling short of market expectations. Transport volumes dropped 1 per cent, and the category of “other services” fell 1.9 per cent. The tourism-specific index also shrank 0.4 per cent, leaving the segment 2.5 per cent below its December 2024 peak. Regional data showed the retreat was widespread: São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Pernambuco and Paraná all recorded declines, while Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro eked out modest gains. Analysts in São Paulo pointed to the drag of a Selic rate held at 14.25 per cent, which, despite a warm labour market and government stimulus, was cooling the appetite for spending on travel and related services.

Amid this uneven landscape, one corner of the Russian leisure industry bucked the trend with a quiet confidence. The country’s legal casinos, confined to a handful of designated zones since a nationwide ban in 2009, drew over one million visitors in the first half of 2026, a 7.1 per cent increase. The Krasnaya Polyana complex in Sochi, home to the Sochi Casino and Boomerang, remained the most popular, with 466,300 guests passing through its doors. Further west, in the Kaliningrad exclave, the Sobranie casino saw its footfall jump nearly 30 per cent to 249,500. Tax payments from the sector rose 11.8 per cent to 1.7 billion roubles. The association representing operators called the gaming zones “reliable anchor points” that sustained regional economies even as the wider tourism industry wobbled. Meanwhile, Russians were also spending more on local wellness: the median cheque at spas and thermal complexes climbed 13 per cent in June to 4,019 roubles, with the number of transactions up 19 per cent, a trend that analysts at the Check Index service said had been building for three to four years and was driven as much by a taste for premium treatments as by price rises.

What emerges from these fragments is not a single story of retreat or resilience, but a mosaic of recalibrated desires. The queues at Narita speak of a Japan that has become a luxury good in itself, where the average stay stretches to seven nights and the souvenir budget rivals the hotel bill. The empty roads of Crimea tell of a domestic tourism model suddenly vulnerable to the mundane logistics of fuel supply. And the bright lights of Sochi’s gaming floors, set against the backdrop of a contracting Brazilian services sector, suggest that when money is tight, the indulgence that survives is often the one closest to home – a spa day, a night at the tables, a short-haul flight to a neighbouring republic. The global traveller of mid-2026 is not staying put, but is moving with a new, more calculating step, tracing routes that follow the availability of petrol as much as the pull of a distant skyline.