America is counting down until Fourth of July, which will be even more special this year as the country celebrates its 250th birthday.
But we regret to say part of its scorecard isn’t looking great - only a third of Americans think it’s living up to its founding ideals.
Scroll down to read about yachts, a milestone in travel, and some of the turmoil the US is facing ahead of its big birthday.
Stats to power your week
🚔In 2020 George Floyd was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, sparking civil disturbances and leading to a spike in concerns about heavy-handed policing. With two people killed by ICE agents in the same city at the beginning of this year, a sense of deja vu seems to have emerged with concern about police brutality at its highest level (48%) among Democrats since 2021. GWI USA
🤝Allow us to call a truce in the gender war: men and women are equally likely to agree that men feel pressure to improve their appearance through looksmaxxing, grooming, working out and the like (both 51%). GWI Pulse
😬“Extremeness aversion” is a robust finding in consumer research, especially when it comes to price. We’re wary of picking the cheapest or costliest option in any category (which is why we tend to order the second-cheapest wine). It appears in travel too - 37% pick “reasonable options, but not the cheapest” - the most popular option of those available. GWI Travel
🤝With the UK potentially on the verge of appointing its fifth Prime Minister in four years, we wanted to share that the thing Brits are most likely to say lowers their level of trust in a political figure is failure to deliver on promises (71%) - much more than negative media coverage (27%). GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: the 1%
Without GWI data
With GWI data
Let’s face it, we all have a fascination with the 1% - just look at the ratings for “The White Lotus” and “Succession”.
It’s certainly a leisure-friendly image of the upper crust those shows present, idling around on a luxury yacht. Wealth, in the popular imagination, equates with leisure.
If we build an audience of the elite - high earners who travel often and have a high net worth - a different image emerges. The strongest cues aren’t just yachts and sunlit decks, but movement, information, and financial activity.
That matters because the 1% is defined more by active financial habits than just pure idleness. 69% use the internet for managing finances or savings, making them 95% more likely than average to do so.
Chart of the week
Since AI chatbots broke onto the scene in 2022, travel planning has been highlighted as one of their strongest use-cases - able to bring together information from multiple sources, and perform cost estimates on the fly. Less than four years on, and we’ve hit an impressive milestone: more consumers now use AI agents to plan their trips than human travel agents.
This trend is taking off fastest in emerging markets, but even in the US, the two methods are about level, and the direction of travel indicates this crossover will happen in more places in the coming months.
More from GWI
As well as the growth of AI tools in planning trips, what else can we learn about travelers in 2026? Aarushi Kumar, Associate Director of Strategic Insights at Tripadvisor, joined us recently to tell us about them.
A focus group at your fingertips? Just one of the many use-cases available to you with Agent Spark - read up on what synthetic personas can do for you.
