Travel Supercycle 2026: Record Bookings, World Cup, Cheap Fuel

Goal: ride the 2026 travel boom for 12-24 months, risk class balanced to speculative, base currency USD. The wave season is the strongest on record: Royal Caribbean reported a record-smashing 2025 and its best booking streak ever on January 29 and raised 2026 guidance, which lifted Carnival and Norwegian with it. Airlines have premium demand intact (American sees strong 2026 profit on premium demand, Reuters 27.01.) and the World Cup in North America starts in June with airfares already rising. Fuel is the tailwind nobody talks about: Brent sits under $70 after OPEC+ kept its production pause and everybody is worried about oversupply. I own cruise lines, the two best US network carriers, Lufthansa and TUI for the European summer, the online travel agencies and LVMH as the luxury-travel-retail proxy. What this is not: a defensive portfolio, these names fall hard in a recession or an oil spike, so my invalidation is a sustained jump in jet fuel or a drop in forward bookings in the Q1 reports.