In 2026, Gen Z goes into debt to go on vacation More and more under-30s are taking out loans to fund their holidays

Where should you go on vacation? The quintessential summer question is back, along with all the pressure it brings. For many people, the chance to spend time away from the city where they work all year long is far from a given. Financial hardship is tangled up with an uncertain geopolitical climate, and the consequences reach right into the heart of the summer season. According to a report by Europ Assistance, in 2026 17% of Italians will not be going on holiday; of these, 66% will be skipping it primarily for financial reasons. But alongside those who are opting out, a parallel phenomenon is growing - less openly acknowledged but increasingly visible: there are those who go anyway, even if it means going into debt.

In 2026, a holiday seems to have become a non-negotiable right, one worth defending even with microloan financial tools. In the first five months of the year, it is estimated that over 170 million euros in personal loans were issued to finance trips and holidays. The average amount requested is around 5,400 euros, to be repaid over 50 monthly instalments of approximately 132 euros. What is striking is that nearly a third of applications come from people under 30: a generation that grew up with Ryanair and Airbnb, now squeezed between precarious wages and a cost of living that turns a weekend in Barcelona into an expense to be spread across 50 convenient instalments.

Is it worth going into debt because of FOMO?

Behind the boom in credit-funded holidays lies more than just the desire to get away — there is a growing cultural pressure: the pressure to showcase your leisure time online, to perform your holiday, to visually narrate your own wellbeing. In a climate dominated by image, simply resting is not enough, and so the holiday loses its primary function, to restore body and mind, and becomes content to be produced, an event to be documented. Relaxation and success go hand in hand, between carefully curated feeds and captions. And those who cannot afford it? They often turn to consumer credit out of FOMO - that is, simply to avoid being left out of the collective narrative.

The gap between real possibilities and performative expectations produces obvious short circuits. Free time is transformed into a moral obligation, while the idea takes hold that even rest must be quantified. The alternatives - short day trips, days at home with friends or family - seem insufficient if they are not shared, photographed, made public. And so freedom bends to representation. And yet there are still forms of pause that escape the rhetoric of the documented journey. Staying home, reading a book with the shutters down and the unreal silence of a city emptying out is not a defeat, but a therapeutic act, a mental space that withdraws from the logic of constant exposure, a suspended time that asks nothing of us in return.

It is not so much the holiday itself that has become necessary, but its representation. Borrowing a concept from Baudrillard, we no longer go on holiday to rest, but to prove that we went. The simulacrum, the copy without an original, takes the place of the experience. And if getting the perfect sunset shot requires a microloan, so be it. Nobody will post their overdrawn balance. Just Negronis with a sea view.