Budget Your Trip helps answer one of the most important questions in travel planning:
How much does it actually cost to visit a destination?
Our travel-cost estimates are based primarily on expenses recorded by real travelers during actual trips. Since 2010, travelers have used Budget Your Trip to track what they spent on accommodation, meals, transportation, activities and other travel expenses in destinations around the world.
We anonymously combine these expenses, review the data for quality and use statistical methods to calculate typical daily costs for different destinations and styles of travel.
The result is a practical starting point for building a realistic travel budget—not an estimate generated from generic assumptions or artificial intelligence.
Travelers create a trip on Budget Your Trip and enter their expenses by destination and category. These expenses can include:
Each entry represents money that a traveler actually spent, rather than a hypothetical price or a general cost-of-living estimate.
Travelers can use this information to follow their own budgets and see charts, tables and breakdowns of their spending. Their entries also contribute to our broader collection of travel costs.
A travel budget is only useful when similar expenses are compared with one another. We organize submitted expenses according to where the money was spent and what it was spent on.
For example, a hotel expense is included with accommodation costs, while a metro ticket is included with local transportation. Organizing expenses by category allows us to calculate both an overall daily travel cost and more detailed estimates for accommodation, food, transportation and activities. (You can read more about how the costs are specifically calculated here.)
When necessary, expenses are converted into a common display currency so travelers can compare destinations more easily.
The averages shown on Budget Your Trip do not reveal an individual traveler’s private trip information.
Instead, qualifying expenses from many trips are anonymously aggregated by destination. This allows us to identify typical spending patterns without displaying who submitted a particular expense.
Travelers may also choose to make their individual trip private. Private trip expenses can still contribute anonymously to destination averages, but other visitors cannot view the details of that trip.
We do not treat every submitted number as automatically representative of a destination.
Travel spending naturally varies, and occasional entries may be unusually high, unusually low, incomplete or entered under the wrong category. We use statistical checks to identify expenses that fall outside a reasonable range.
As part of this process, only costs within two standard deviations of the median are included in the relevant averages. This reduces the influence of extreme values while preserving the genuine differences between budget, mid-range and higher-spending trips.
We also review calculated results and unusual patterns for issues such as:
These checks help prevent a single unusual trip or data-entry mistake from distorting the cost shown for an entire destination.
The average daily cost represents the typical amount spent by one traveler during one day in a destination.
To calculate it, we combine qualifying expenses from actual trips and distribute the relevant costs across the number of travelers and travel days represented in the data.
We also separate costs by travel style when enough information is available. This helps travelers understand the difference between a budget trip, a typical mid-range trip and a more expensive or luxury trip.
Not every category is calculated in exactly the same way. Some figures represent an average cost per person per day, while others represent the typical price of an individual purchase. The notes accompanying a cost explain how that figure should be interpreted.
Because of these differences, the individual category averages may not always add up exactly to the overall daily average. You can read how the costs are calculated here.
The overall daily estimate generally includes ordinary expenses incurred while traveling, such as:
Some expenses are tracked separately and are not normally included in the total daily average. These may include:
Keeping these expenses separate makes it easier to compare the normal day-to-day cost of visiting different destinations.
Traveler submissions form the foundation of our average daily travel costs. We also systematically analyze prices from major travel companies and booking platforms, including hotel, hostel, tour and activity providers.
These pricing sources serve a different purpose.
Traveler-reported expenses show what people have actually spent across completed trips. Current provider prices help illustrate what a traveler may encounter when booking a hotel, hostel, tour or activity today.
Depending on the page, you may therefore see:
Provider prices can change according to availability, season, booking date and demand. They should be treated as current examples rather than permanent destination averages.
Some booking links are affiliate links. If a traveler makes a booking through one of these links, Budget Your Trip may receive a commission at no additional cost to the traveler. Affiliate relationships do not determine our traveler-reported cost averages.
No. Our destination cost figures are not invented or generated by artificial intelligence.
The averages are calculated using traveler-submitted expenses, established statistical methods and additional travel-pricing data where clearly identified.
Technology helps us organize and analyze a large amount of information, but the underlying travel expenses come from actual people who traveled to these destinations.
Someone purchased dinner in Cape Town. Someone else stayed in a hostel in Amsterdam, rode a bus in Peru or visited a museum in Paris. Together, those real expenses create a clearer picture of what travel costs around the world.
Travel prices change over time, and no travel-cost database can perfectly predict what every traveler will spend. We therefore review our data and destination information on an ongoing basis.
Our review process may include:
Where available, destination pages may display information such as the period covered by the data, the number of travelers or expense records represented, and the date of the most recent editorial review.
A review date does not mean that every price in a destination changed on that date. It means the page and its supporting information were checked for accuracy, clarity and potential problems.
Budget Your Trip’s figures are designed to help you create a realistic starting budget and compare the relative cost of different destinations.
They are not guaranteed prices or a prediction of exactly what your trip will cost.
Your spending may be higher or lower depending on:
A backpacker staying in hostel dorms will have a very different budget from a traveler staying in upscale hotels. Families, couples and solo travelers may also divide costs differently.
For the best estimate, use our average costs as a baseline and then adjust the individual categories to reflect the trip you are planning.
Travel costs are different from general cost-of-living information.
A local resident may pay monthly rent, cook most meals at home and use a commuter pass. A visitor is more likely to book short-term accommodation, eat in restaurants, purchase individual transportation tickets and pay admission to attractions.
By collecting expenses from travelers, Budget Your Trip focuses on the costs visitors are more likely to encounter.
This also makes it possible to compare destinations using consistent categories. You can see whether one city tends to be more expensive for accommodation, whether another has particularly affordable meals or whether transportation and sightseeing substantially affect the total budget.
Budget Your Trip depends on contributions from travelers.
If you have recently completed a trip, you can sign up, create a travel budget, and enter your expenses. You will receive a detailed breakdown of your own spending while also helping future travelers build more realistic budgets.
The more high-quality information travelers contribute, the more useful the destination averages become.
Add your trip expenses and help other travelers plan with better information.
Every trip is different. The purpose of Budget Your Trip is not to tell you what you must spend.
Our goal is to give you a reliable frame of reference based on real travel experiences. From there, you can decide where to save, where to splurge and which destinations offer the best fit for your budget. To start planning a trip, search for your next destination here.
That is how Budget Your Trip turns thousands of individual travel expenses into practical information that everyone can use.