What a Bed Costs
A dormitory bed in Santiago runs $9. A standard double room in the same city is $36. That gap, four times the price for a door you can close, is the first thing anyone notices when they start pricing long trips.
Move to Buenos Aires and the floor drops. A dormitory bed there costs $6 to $10. A budget double room starts at $25. Head south to El Chalten, a town built around trailheads, and camping costs about $5 per day while a dormitory bed starts at $10. You are paying five dollars for a roof and a mattress, which is either a bargain or a waste depending on the weather.
Indonesia behaves differently again. Hostels are plentiful all over the country and rarely cost more than $10 for a bed in a dorm room. The country is made up of over 6,000 inhabited islands out of 17,508 total, which means the supply of coastline is not the constraint. Finding a beach to hang out on costs nothing.
Those are the low numbers. The mid-range is where most people actually land. Hostel dorms run $18 to $25. Hotels run $50 to $80. Boutique hotels run $100 to $160. Three tiers, roughly double each time.
Two Ways to Spend a Week
For one week, budget travelers should plan for approximately $175 to $280. That covers hostels, affordable meals, buses and independent sightseeing. Call it $25 to $40 a day.
Lunch in a local restaurant in Uruguay cost about $12. A McDonald’s meal was about $10. Shopping and cooking are not that crazy in price, and a hostel with cooking facilities is the cheapest way to travel there. The two dollars you save choosing the golden arches over a proper lunch is not really the point. The point is that a kitchen changes the arithmetic for every meal after the first one.
Manila is cheaper than most people expect. If you don’t mind hostels or single rooms with bare amenities, you can live there quite cheaply, on $600 to $1,000 per month on the high end. That is rent, food and the rest, not just a bed. The catch is that the same person describing those numbers is living in Manila for the low cost of living, not passing through for a week.
The Long Trip Discount
Travel for four weeks instead of two and transport costs tend to be lower. That is not a trick, it is just how the math works when a bus pass or a long-distance route gets spread over more days. Prices across the board may have been slightly higher, but the per-day figure still came down.
The big totals are worth staring at. One traveller’s accommodation line came to $6,882. They slept in apartments, a campervan, hotels, hostels, house sitting, a tent, a car, a bus, a boat, and a couple of nights in the airport. Another trip logged $10,261 on accommodation, across hotels, hostels, apartments and couchsurfing.
Those are not weekly figures. They are what a long trip actually costs when you add it all up, and they explain why the daily hostel price matters less than the number of nights you book it for.
Location Has a Price Too
A hostel roughly five minutes from the BTS in Bangkok has a downside. It is a little out of the way, and you will spend about 40 minutes getting to any major sites. Cheap and central rarely occupy the same address. You pay in fare or you pay in time, and the time is usually the bigger bill.
The same logic applies at the scale of countries. For a mid-range budget, on $32,000 you are looking at either the same locations as a budget trip but with upgraded accommodation, food and transport, or you travel frugally with hostels and homemade meals and throw in extra time in Europe, Oceania, the U.S. and surprisingly pricey destinations like Japan.
So the dorm bed is not really a $9 decision or a $25 decision. It is a decision about how many weeks the money lasts, and which map that buys you.
Leave a Reply