With summer getting its groove one, many of us will be looking for inspiration for our next trip.
And while sunshine and the search for somewhere new are important, who doesn’t like a nice travel bargain?
With summer getting its groove one, many of us will be looking for inspiration for our next trip.
And while sunshine and the search for somewhere new are important, who doesn’t like a nice travel bargain?
We recently revealed five of the top value-for-money destinations in Europe. Now TripAdvisor has published a report on the 10 cheapest – and most expensive – city breaks around the world.
From Bangkok to Budapest, the results really do reveal worlds apart…
Best value vs priciest city
Asian cities came out cheapest in the TripAdvisor cost comparison study, which looked at the price of common holiday items in 48 top tourist cities around the world.
Hanoi stole the crown as most affordable, with a city break there lightening your wallet by just £91.70. Two cocktails came in at £8.76, two taxi journeys just over £3, a 4-star hotel room £59 and a meal for two with wine around £20.
The most expensive city in the study? Our very own London, with a city break – “break” being the operative word – depriving travellers of a sobering £311.80 on average.
The bill, please
For dining, Hanoi was again the cheapest city and Stockholm the most expensive. A meal with drinks in the Swedish capital cost almost £103 – more than all of the city break costs in Hanoi put together.
Go out in Sweden, or go to Hanoi? Hmm.
Taxi!
The second cheapest city overall was Jakarta, in popular Indonesia. This was also the most affordable metropolis for travelling around – a two-mile taxi journey there and back costing you, at about £1.75, less than a London bus fare.
Again, Scandinavia tipped the scales the other way. For the same kind of journey in the priciest transport city, Oslo, you’d shell out just under a cracking £34.
Jakarta was also the second cheapest city overall, followed by the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh and another Asian capital, Bangkok.
Five Asian cities dominated the best value top 10, but Eastern Europe also played strongly. The Bulgarian capital, Sofia, was the fifth cheapest for city stays, Prague was in ninth place, and Budapest 10th.
The moral? You don’t need to cross the world for a bargain short break.
Budget-bashers
So where to avoid if you don’t want to pay over the odds for a summer city break? Try Paris, where two cocktails could cost you an oh là là £31 – that’s more than 15 times the average bar price in the Mexican tourist city of Cancún.
Another wallet-worrier and purse-pounder? New York, unsurprisingly, the third most expensive city – where total city break costs inched over £300.
But the Big Apple topped the chart for the second year running as the most expensive city for a hotel room. At £218 a night, a four-star stay cost just over four times more than in that bargain hot spot Jakarta.
The sole African nation in TripAdvisor’s top 10s was Cape Town, in South Africa, which was the sixth cheapest city. Sydney was the 10th most expensive.
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