What Nobody Tells You About Italy and Greece

Two Countries, One Border, Two Budgets

Cross the causeway from Johor Bahru into Singapore and the price of everything roughly triples. That is not an exaggeration for effect. It is the single most useful number in this part of Southeast Asia.

A hostel dorm bed in Malaysia runs $6 to $12 per night. The same dorm bed in Singapore runs double that. A private hostel room in Malaysia costs $15 to $30. In Singapore, the same private room is triple. A budget hotel in Malaysia is $15 to $35 per night. A budget hotel in Singapore is $100. Similar quality hotels in the major hubs of Brazil, China, Korea, Japan and Singapore sit closer to $50 to $100 per night, which tells you Singapore is priced alongside cities that most people already expect to be expensive.

So the daily budget splits hard. Careful budget travellers spend $80 to $120 a day in Singapore. In the rest of the region, the same kind of traveller spends $25 to $45. That gap is the whole article. Everything below is just detail hanging off it.

What Eighteen Months Actually Cost

One traveller did 18 months across Southeast Asia on $8,200, including separate one-way flights back and forth from the US. That trip covered Singapore three times, Malaysia six times, Indonesia once, Thailand twice and the Philippines once. The arithmetic works out to roughly $15 a day, which only makes sense with the next part: making friends along the way meant a lot of free food and places to sleep. That is not a strategy you can book in advance. It is what happens when you stay somewhere long enough.

A separate traveller reported Thailand’s daily average sitting relatively high, but noted it drops to $30.73 per day once diving and massage courses are removed from the total. Those courses added a daily average of $4.79 per person. Strip out the expensive activities and Thailand lands right behind Malaysia on the daily cost table.

Another couple planned 167 days through Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia with just over 9,000 euro, flights booked, insurance bought and vaccinations done. At 1 EUR = 1.08 USD, that is about $9,720, or roughly $58 a day for two people before the flights were counted separately. Read that against the $25 to $45 regional figure and it looks generous. Read it against Singapore’s $80 to $120 and it looks like a plan built around avoiding Singapore.

Singapore in Small Doses

Singapore’s average gets skewed in both directions. One traveller kept accommodation costs down by sleeping in Malaysia and making day trips across the border. That works, and it is why the city-state’s numbers can look softer than they are. Accommodation is the line item that breaks budgets there, not food.

Tap water in Singapore is clean, so a refillable bottle solves a problem that costs money elsewhere. A small bottle of water runs S$1, which is about $1.08. Choose refill points with some care, because not every toilet is clean.

Three to four days is the sensible visit. Not three weeks. One commenter put it bluntly: a vacation in modern Singapore would be like a week in hell for a $10-a-day traveller, and the $10-a-day generation is long gone. Harsh, but the $80 to $120 daily figure backs it up. Chinatown and Little India are where cheaper beer and food turn up, and those two areas absorbed a lot of time for travellers who were watching the meter.

Moving Between Them

There is a multi-day train linking Bangkok, Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. It is a fun experience and you can get off along the way rather than riding it end to end. For Laos, a semi-new Bangkok–Vientiane train takes 11 to 13 hours and costs around 1,030 THB, which converts to about $29.

Transport inside Singapore is the other quiet budget killer. Taxis and transportation there are comparable to Western prices. In Malaysia they are not.

None of this makes Singapore a bad stop. It makes it a short one. Budget for $80 to $120 a day, sleep in Malaysia if the border crossing suits you, carry a bottle, and give the rest of your weeks to the country next door, where the same dorm bed costs $6 to $12 and the private room costs what a dorm costs in the city across the water.