Saudi Arabia: Prices and Practicalities
Jeddah and Riyadh are the two cities most budget travellers end up in, and they are the two where the money goes furthest. Good hotels in either city start at around $65 to $86 a night. That is the realistic floor for a clean room in a decent location, not a dorm bed and not a hostel. Saudi Arabia does not have much of a backpacker hostel scene, so the accommodation line in your budget will be higher than you are used to from Southeast Asia or the Balkans.
Compare that to the Red Sea coast. The new luxury resorts there start at roughly $540 a night and run past $3,240. Those are different trips for different people. If you are reading a budget blog, you are not staying there, but it is useful to know where the ceiling sits so you understand what the $65 room actually is. It is a normal hotel room, not a hardship.
What the Coast Costs
The Red Sea developments are the headline spend in the country right now. Five hundred and forty dollars is the entry point, and the top end goes beyond three thousand. That range buys a specific kind of experience, and the people paying it are not counting meals. For everyone else, the coast is a place you visit for a day or skip entirely in favour of the cities, where the same water is visible from public beaches and the hotel is a fraction of the price.
Sharing the Cost
The single biggest lever on a trip like this is travelling as a group. Four people, arranged as two couples, cuts costs by up to 50 percent on accommodation and on a car. That is not a small saving. A $65 room split two ways drops to roughly $33 each. A car split four ways does the same thing to the transport line. The arithmetic is simple and it is the difference between a tight trip and a comfortable one.
This is the same logic that applies anywhere with weak public transport and expensive rooms. You are not negotiating a discount. You are just dividing the same bill by more people. Two couples travelling together in Saudi Arabia will spend meaningfully less per person than two solo travellers moving in parallel, and they will have a car.
Food and Daily Spend
Eat local. That is the whole strategy. Food from home costs more, and it is usually worse. The local option is cheaper and it is the reason you came.
For a sense of what a low daily number looks like elsewhere, consider some comparisons. In Mirissa, on the Sri Lankan coast, two days of food came to $20. Bulgaria averages around $60 a day all in. A three-week budget trip through Western Europe runs somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 excluding flights, which is roughly $70 to $95 a day. A premium trek in Nepal costs $200 to $400 per day, with high-end lodges at $80 to $200 a night, full board, a senior guide, a porter and agency logistics included. Indonesia remains one of the cheapest island countries anywhere, with more than 17,000 islands and prices to match outside Bali.
None of those numbers are Saudi numbers. They are there to calibrate. Saudi Arabia sits above the Southeast Asian and Balkan figures and below the premium trekking and Red Sea resort figures. Budget somewhere in the middle and you will not be far off.
Small Things That Bite
Watch the deposit. Hotels in Bangkok have been known to charge a security deposit that never appears on the booking page. One traveller paid 1,000 baht, about $31, for a three-night stay, returned on departure. It came back, but it was $31 held for the length of the trip. Assume something similar can happen and keep a buffer.
The other thing is drinking. Going out is fine and a drink is fine, but the travellers who blow their budget do it on alcohol, not on rooms. A hangover also costs you a day, and a day is the most expensive thing you have. If you want to see what the country has, keep the nights short. The budget survives and so do you.
Leave a Reply