What a Bed Costs
A six-bed mixed dorm at Ostello Bello in mid-March runs 50 euro, which is about $54. A single room at the same place is 103 euro, or roughly $111. That second number is the one that matters, because a B&B hotel in the same city often prices its single rooms in the same range. You are not saving much by taking the dorm, and you are giving up a door that locks.
Hostels did not stay cheap after Covid. That is the whole story in two numbers. The dorm bed that once undercut every hotel in town now sits close to what a budget guesthouse charges, and the private room at a hostel costs more than the hotel room down the street. Run the comparison before you assume the dorm is the frugal choice.
Cooking Your Own
A budget two-burner propane stove costs $25 to $45. A canister of propane runs about $5 to $8, and one canister gets you roughly two to three trips’ worth of cooking. Do the arithmetic against a restaurant meal and the stove pays for itself quickly if you are staying more than a few days.
This only works if your accommodation has a kitchen or a space where a stove is allowed. A dorm bed at a hostel usually comes with kitchen access. A hotel single room usually does not. That is the trade you are actually making when you pay $111 for a private room instead of $54 for a bunk: you get quiet, and you lose the ability to cook.
What Else Eats the Budget
Travel insurance belongs in the total. So does a Schengen visa at 90 euro, about $97, if it applies to you, and the future ETIAS fee of around 20 euro, roughly $22, for eligible travellers. A SIM and data top-up is another line. None of these are optional once you have committed to the trip, and none of them show up in the nightly rate you compared.
Add a contingency of 10 to 20 percent on top of your total for inflation and price changes. That is not padding. It is the difference between a budget that survives the trip and one that does not.
The way to hold this together is to allocate a portion of your total to each category before you go. If you have budgeted $1,000 and you plan to spend more on activities than on accommodation, shift the allocation to match. The number is yours to set. What matters is that accommodation, food, transport, insurance and the contingency each get a line, rather than one lump you spend down until it is gone.
The Numbers From Elsewhere
It helps to see what other destinations cost, because it calibrates what you should expect to pay. Vietnam runs from about $30 a day. A private safari in Kenya starts around $300 per person per day, which puts it in the mid-range bracket for safaris. Licensed trekking guides in Nepal cost $25 to $35 per day in 2026, and porters cost $15 to $22 per day. Those rates are set by the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal as minimum wage benchmarks, and reputable agencies pay at or above them.
A luxury bus from Pokhara to Kathmandu is $24 to $26 one way, lunch and water included. A durian ice cream or a sarabi, a coconut pancake-like snack, costs about Tk 30 per piece in Indonesia, which is a small fraction of a dollar.
These are different countries with different cost structures. The point is not to compare Mauritius to Nepal directly. The point is that a daily figure is only useful when you know what it covers. Vietnam’s $30 a day covers a bed, food and local transport in a way that $30 in Mauritius will not.
Reading the Numbers
The hostel-versus-hotel comparison is the one worth repeating. A $54 dorm bed and a $111 single room at the same hostel, when a B&B single is priced similarly to the latter, tells you that the hostel premium is not where you think it is. The savings are in the dorm, and the dorm is not as cheap as it used to be.
Work out your categories. Set the contingency. Compare the private room to the hotel before you book either. The stove is worth $25 to $45 if you have a kitchen and you are staying long enough to use it twice. If you do not have a kitchen, skip it.
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