What a Night Out Actually Costs
A large bottle of BeerLao costs about $1. That single figure explains why so many travellers end up staying in Laos longer than planned. It is widely considered one of the best beers in the world, and at roughly a dollar per large bottle, the maths for an evening works out very differently than it does almost anywhere else.
Compare that to Indonesia. Imported beers such as San Miguel and Corona run an average of $3.50 to $6. The local alternative, Bintang, is slightly cheaper than the imports. Not dramatically cheaper. Slightly. If you are drinking imported beer in Indonesia you are paying a premium for a label you already know, when the domestic option sits right next to it on the same menu.
In Armenia the numbers drop again. Wine costs around $2, guesthouses around $20, and Americans get 180 days visa-free. Yerevan has a cafe culture, ancient monasteries within reach, and some of the world’s oldest winemaking. At Caucasus prices, a bottle of wine costs less than a coffee in most Western capitals. It pairs naturally with Georgia if you are routing through the region.
Wine in Portugal
If you are drinking in Portugal, drink wine. This is not a stylistic preference. It is arithmetic. Restaurants serve excellent wine at $10 to $15 a bottle. That price is low enough that there is no reason to investigate what the spirits cost. One traveller put it plainly: they never found out what other drinks cost, because at $10 a bottle there was no need to look further.
A packaged tour of Portugal and Spain runs about $200 per day, with stays at hotels in Lisbon and Porto, port wine tastings, a Douro River cruise, and guided tours including Lisbon’s Belem Tower. That is a different kind of trip. For $200 a day you are not counting beer bottles. You are paying for someone else to count them for you.
The Daily Beer Budget
If you like a beer in the evenings, budget an extra $10 per day. That is the working figure. It covers a few drinks in most of the places where budget travel makes sense, and it should sit separately from your food and accommodation line, because it is the first thing that quietly disappears when you stop tracking.
Barcelona in high season runs $19 to $44 per night for accommodation. That is before you have had anything to drink. The low end and the high end of that range are more than double apart, and the difference is not quality. It is timing. Book the same room in the same city in a different month and you are paying a different price for the same bed.
Small Money, Fast
Those £2 beers, £3 tuk-tuk rides and £5 souvenir T-shirts add up with frightening speed. Individually none of them matter. Collectively they are the entire budget. A simple budgeting app on your phone does the job, or a basic spreadsheet. The point is not the tool. The point is that the money leaves in small amounts, and small amounts are the hardest to remember.
Grocery stops are where this cuts the other way. Nuts, a bag of chips, a chocolate bar — never more than $1 in a convenience store. Set lunches in cities run $2.70 to $4.80 per person. The best bargain one traveller found was in Ica: $10 for a vegetarian set lunch for four people. That is $2.50 each for a full meal, which is less than a single imported beer in Indonesia.
Peru’s cities sit at the cheap end. Indonesia’s imported beer sits at the expensive end. Laos sits at a dollar a bottle and people stay for months. None of these places are interchangeable, and the drink prices are not the reason to go to any of them. But they are the reason some travellers stay longer than they meant to, and the reason others run out of money in the third week.
One Thing That Isn’t About Money
A misunderstanding at a border cost Lucas Sielaff 16 days in detention and then deportation, at his own expense. The question that caused it was misread. Nothing about that story involves drink prices or bar tabs, and it is worth keeping in mind when the trip is going well and the beer is cheap. Border officials are not bartenders. They do not care how good your evening was.
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