Is this AI?

a computer chip with the letter a on top of it

Recently, a reader sent us a question: “Are your travel costs generated by AI?”

No, they are not.

For the last 15 years, we’ve been gathering travel cost data from real travelers. (In fact, the 15th anniversary of Budget Your Trip is right now, in January of 2025.) This website started as a fun experiment to ask travelers how much they were spending in different parts of the world, and it has grown into this huge repository of travel cost information that helps thousands of people every day. We started this as a hobby to help other travelers figure out their costs, and we’re proud to say that we’re still doing the same thing, just bigger and better.

Anyone can sign up, add their expenses, and help contribute to the average costs for locations around the world. As you might already know, we take all of the expenses that people contribute and then anonymously average them using some fairly sophisticated statistical math. This determines the average daily costs that you can find across our website (for example: France or Bangkok). 

So, no, our travel costs are not generated from AI. It’s just standard deviations, averages, outliers, and medians, all calculated from actual people who have given us information about their travel expenses.

It has become very trendy these days to claim that something is AI when it is not. Many companies are re-branding their existing services as “AI” simply because they do some interesting things with computer algorithms. However, we are not going to dazzle you with fancy AI marketing because we believe in the integrity of our data, the truth of math, the reliability of real people, and the fundamental concept of providing legitimately helpful information to travelers. AI might have its place on the internet, and it will be increasing even more over the coming years. But that doesn’t change how Budget Your Trip gets its information. Someone just bought dinner in Cape Town, and someone else just took a taxi in Rio. I want to hear from those people, human to human. AI can’t replicate that.

We review our travel cost data as much as possible to make sure it stays updated and realistic. Sometimes mistakes are made, and it’s not perfect. Sometimes we don’t have enough data for remote locations, so the numbers are not as accurate as we’d like them to be (you can sign up and help contribute!). But on the whole, the data is real, maintained by humans, and always growing.

Some sections of our website contain information about the average prices of hotels and tours. This data is provided by large travel companies, and we also use math and statistics to find the average prices. Hotel data is provided by Kayak, and tour data is provided by TourRadar. (We clearly label the data when it comes from travel providers instead of traveling people.) The hotel and tour prices are also not generated by AI. Hotel prices are set by the individual hotels, then advertised on various websites, including Kayak. The same is true for tour prices, which are set by tour operators. None of this data is automatically generated or “made up” – it comes from real travel companies that publish consistent prices to customers. We analyze the cost data to show average prices, often broken down by categories to give you an idea of what you might expect to pay for your trip (for example, New York Hotel Prices and Peru Tour Prices).

Occasionally we might use AI tools to assist us write articles faster, checking for grammar mistakes and the like to help us work more efficiently. But the travel cost data is never based on AI data.

If you find something that seems weird, strange, incorrect, or missing, then please simply let us know. We are always working to make the travel cost data better and more accurate, as well as the website as a whole. We’re a very very very small company with a very hands-on approach to everything. Also, we’re real people, so if there is a problem, we’re happy to figure it out the old fashioned way: with our human brains.

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