How We Work Out Costs

Where our prices come from, and how far you can trust them

Every cost page on Great Wide Open is built the same way: the same basket of everyday items, priced from a named source, checked on a stated date. That is what lets you set one country beside another and trust that the comparison is fair.

This page sets out the method in full: what we price, where each figure comes from, how we price places to stay, which exchange rates we use and what our figures cannot tell you. If something here does not hold up, we would rather you told us.

Last updated 8 October 2026

One basket, every country

A cost page is only as useful as its definitions. A beer might mean a small bottle in one country and a pint in another, and a comparison built on that is no comparison at all. So every country is priced against the same standard basket of twenty-five items, each with a fixed definition.

The standard basket, by group
Group	What we price	Defined as
Places to stay	Dorm bed; budget private room; mid-range hotel; luxury hotel	Per bed or per room, per night
Food and drink	Fast-food meal; cheap restaurant meal; mid-range dinner; top-end dinner; cappuccino; draught beer; shop beer; bottled water	Numbeo’s own item definitions, the same in every country; a top-end dinner is a tasting menu, per person, at a restaurant chosen for its food and the experience
Getting around	Single city ride; a day of city transport; taxi start; airport to centre; the country’s main intercity trip	Standard adult fare
Seeing and doing	The best-known paid sight; the main national museum; a booked day tour	Adult entry or per person
Before you go and incidentals	Visa or travel authorisation; mobile data for one to two weeks	Per person, UK passport
Daily budgets	Careful, comfortable and indulgent days	Per person per day on the ground, built from the items above

The full definitions are kept in our cost register and reviewed every twelve months. Some items cannot be made identical between countries — a dorm in Seoul is not a dorm in Sydney — and where the difference matters, the country’s cost page says so.

Where each figure comes from

Each item has one assigned source, chosen for what it does best. We put our own time where no published source can do the job, which is mainly places to stay.

Where each kind of figure comes from
Kind of figure	Source	Review
Everyday food and drink, a single city ride, a taxi start	Numbeo, the crowd-sourced price database, read for the country’s main city and credited on the page with the number of contributors	Every 12 months
Fixed prices: passes, airport links, intercity fares, entry tickets, visa fees	The operator or the official authority, at its own price page	Every 12 months, and after any announced change
Places to stay, and top-end dinners	Our own sample of real rooms on booking sites, raised to a year-round level with trivago’s 12-month price forecast (see below), and of restaurants’ own menus, Michelin-starred or equivalent	Every 12 months, or sooner if a band looks wrong
Booked day tours	GetYourGuide and Viator: the full-day group tours most travellers book from the main city, priced per person	Every 12 months
Daily budgets for the three styles	Built from the basket, then checked against the government’s own survey of what visitors spend	Whenever an input changes

Numbeo figures are used with a link back, under Numbeo’s terms for non-commercial sites. We do not use booking-site price averages: they are not defined well enough to publish. Other published budget guides are a private check on our totals, never a source for them.

How we price places to stay

Room prices change by the night, so no single figure is true for long. We search real rooms on booking sites for future dates, record each price with the property, the room and the date seen, and publish the middle half of what we find: the cheapest and dearest quarter are set aside so one bargain or one splurge cannot set the band.

One night is not the year, so we do not publish one. We sample real rooms for a single weeknight in each country’s main city — six to eight properties for each type of stay, in two areas — and then raise those prices to a year-round level using trivago’s forecast of average hotel rates for every month of the coming year. Each cost page names its cheapest and dearest months, because in some cities the difference is double. A forecast is an estimate, not a price: the rate for your dates is the one the hotel gives you.

Some bands have no upper limit: a luxury hotel can cost almost anything. The page then states a floor, such as “from ₩300,000”, and our cost builder prices the room at the middle of the rooms we sampled, so its totals are typical rather than the cheapest possible.

Exchange rates

Prices are kept in the local currency, which is what you will pay. Where we show pounds, dollars or euros, we convert at the European Central Bank’s published reference rate on a stated date, and every conversion on a page uses the same date. Your own card or exchange will cost a little more than the reference rate; allow for its fee.

What our figures are not

Not a quote. They are a model for planning and comparison. The price for your dates is the one the operator or hotel gives you.
Not every price. Airfares and car hire change too fast to print; our pages describe how they are priced and send you to a live quote.
Not residents’ spending. Numbeo’s figures come from people who live in a city; where a visitor would usually pay more, the cost page says so.
Not first-hand everywhere. Where we have not yet travelled in a country, its cost page is researched, and says so.

Who pays for this

We do. Great Wide Open carries no advertising and no affiliate links, and we have never accepted free travel; every trip is paid for by us. No business has paid to appear in or influence a cost page. Our disclosure page sets this out in full and will be updated first if anything changes.

Changes to our method

When we change how we price, or find a published figure was wrong, we record it here.

Changes to our method
Date	What changed
8 October 2026	Method adopted across all countries: one standard basket, a named source for each item, a 12-month review. Exchange rates moved to the European Central Bank’s reference rates.
8 October 2026	South Korea: room prices raised after our first sample found the published bands too low by a quarter to a half; careful daily budget raised to match; Seoul metro fare corrected to the June 2025 increase.
8 October 2026	Top-end dinner added to the basket, priced from Michelin-starred tasting menus. Luxury rooms in the cost builder priced at the middle of the rooms sampled rather than the cheapest.
8 October 2026	Room prices made year-round: our January samples are now raised by trivago’s 12-month forecast, which lifted South Korea and Tokyo room prices by a third to a half and Hong Kong’s by about an eighth. Day tours now priced from GetYourGuide and Viator group tours. Hong Kong added to the cost comparison.

A final word on prices

A price is a fact with a date on it. We would rather tell you when we checked, what we checked and what we could not check than hand you a confident number that quietly went out of date.

Andrew + Margaret

Useful elsewhere

Numbeo: cost of living by city Overview
European Central Bank: euro reference rates Official