Cheap is over — what the end of budget tourism teaches sales and marketing

The recent How Money Works video “The End Of Budget Tourism” tackles the structural shift in a consumer market — how budget travel has, in five years, moved from an attractive option to an increasingly poor deal. The topic sounds like a travel-business story. Beneath it is a lesson for every founder building sales and marketing for a growth company.

The short version: cheapest is not a sustainable position when your cost base does not stay in place. This sounds obvious. In practice it is not — which is why the examples in the video are useful also for those whose business does not travel anywhere.

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Source: How Money Works — The End Of Budget Tourism, 24 May 2026

What the collapse of budget tourism is about

The video’s core argument is that many of the pillars of “affordable travel” have collapsed simultaneously. Budget airlines — like the US carrier Spirit Airlines, presented in the video as a central example — have drifted toward bankruptcy, because their business model does not survive the rise in fuel costs, growing labour bills and the slowed delivery rate of Boeing and Airbus aircraft. Hotels have raised prices while in many destinations the service level has dropped. Short-term rentals — Airbnb and others — have come under regulation in a number of European and US cities, which has tightened supply and lifted prices.

The result: affordable travel, which had been attractive on the strength of its offer up to the late 2010s, has been repriced. But those brands that had built their customer promise only on price are now in trouble — not because their product has changed, but because their sales proposition no longer holds.

This is the structure worth looking at also through founder’s eyes.

Lesson 1 — Cheapest is not a position, it is a momentary state

Price is relative. When you are the cheapest today, someone may be cheaper tomorrow — particularly if your costs rise and theirs do not. “We are the cheapest” is, for this reason, a fragile position. It requires that every cost line of yours stays below the competitor’s, and that you stay ahead even when the floor shifts.

In the Finnish growth-company world this typically shows up in an early B2B salesperson trying to win the deal on price alone. It works for a moment. But when supply-chain costs rise, when wage inflation hits, when interest rates change the customer’s budget logic — that position erodes fast. The brand that was “the affordable option” turns into “the bad option”. And you don’t build a growth company from a bad option.

Lesson 2 — A brand that differs only on price is more fragile than it looks

This is the heart of the Spirit Airlines story. The company built itself as a cheap airline — not a quality airline that is affordable, but a cheap airline. The customer knew they would be treated fast, tightly and without extras, but accepted it because the price was below the alternatives. When the price position eroded, there was no longer a difference.

This is a sharp message for the Finnish growth founder. If you ask a customer to choose you, you must offer something another doesn’t — and if that single “something” is the price, you have built your company on slippery ground. Alongside the price there must be another promise: experience, expertise, service level, understanding of the field, ease of onboarding, integration, community. Individually these don’t replace price. Together they build a position that holds on the day you are no longer the cheapest.

Lesson 3 — Marketing that promises “cheapest” works only as long as it is true

The gap between marketing and reality is always a risk. But when your marketing’s promise is “cheapest”, the risk is unusually large — because the consumer can verify it in seconds.

This has shifted with digital comparison services. When a traveller opens Skyscanner or Booking.com, they don’t have to believe anyone’s marketing message about who is cheapest — they see it immediately. If the brand promise doesn’t hold, the customer chooses otherwise, and doesn’t come back. And Google reviews turn a single broken customer experience into a long-running tag the brand can no longer remove.

For a Finnish SaaS company, an online store or a service entrepreneur the same dynamic holds in a different field. Comparison tools, user reviews and open pricing pages have made everything more transparent than ever. A marketing promise that doesn’t survive a five-minute check has turned, in one stroke, from a reputational risk to concrete reputational damage.

Lesson 4 — In B2B sales, the cheapest price is often a red flag, not a draw

This is well known to sales professionals, but not always to the new founder. A B2B customer who buys a yearly contract of tens or hundreds of thousands of euros does not choose the cheapest option — because the cheapest option is often the risky option. They choose the one that looks most likely to sustain the needs of their own organisation over the next three years.

For this reason a B2B salesperson’s job is not to compete on price but to reduce the customer’s risk. Risk can be reduced by surfacing verifiable cases of similar customers, contract guarantees, flexible termination policies, a dedicated support contact, proactive reporting. All of these cost you something, but they are priced into the higher end product the customer pays — which is still cheaper for them than the cheaper alternative, because the risk is lower.

What to take away

The How Money Works video is short — 19 minutes — and it does not deliver founder-advice at the end. But the material leaves three things with a growth founder:

1. Don’t position your company as the cheapest, unless that is a strategic choice you are willing to defend for ten years. Price is a weak moat. And if it is your only moat, you don’t really have a moat.




2. Check your sales proposition: what do you promise the customer if price is taken away? If the answer is “not much”, that is a signal that work is required. Do it before the market forces you.




3. In B2B sales, reduce the customer’s risk rather than lowering your price. Reducing risk is often cheaper for you and more valuable to the customer than a price cut. And it builds a longer customer relationship.

The collapse of budget tourism is a reminder that the market changes slowly — until it changes quickly. Companies that have built their positioning to survive the change have time to adapt. Those that have built it only on price do not.