How it works, and where it can be wrong.

A travel bargain has two parts that are usually reported separately: how much local currency your money buys, and what that local currency buys once you arrive. Most “cheap destinations” lists look only at the first. This index is built around the difference.

The core idea: the real exchange rate

If a currency falls 20% against yours but prices in that country rise 30%, your trip got more expensive, not cheaper. So every move is adjusted for inflation in both places:

A positive number means your money goes further than it did; a negative one means the destination got dearer for you, whatever the currency chart says. We compute this over three and twelve months, and compare today’s level with the average of the previous five calendar years to see whether a country is cheap against its own history or merely cheaper than last year.

What a day costs

No free data source reports what a traveller spends per day, so this part starts with judgement. Each country has a hand-built baseline for three styles of travel (lean, mid-range, comfortable), per person, excluding international flights, fixed in US dollars as of June 2025. From there it is mechanical:

In words: local prices keep rising at the local rate of inflation, and are then converted at today’s exchange rate. The baselines are estimates and the largest source of error in the index. Treat any daily cost as accurate to within perhaps 20%, and more useful for comparing countries than for budgeting a specific trip.

The composite index

Four components, each scored 0 to 100, are combined with fixed weights:

Two rules override the arithmetic. A country under a Level 4 advisory is removed from the rankings altogether. A country at Level 3 cannot score above 62, however cheap it becomes. A collapsing currency is often a symptom of exactly the instability that makes a place unwise to visit, and the index should not reward it.

Safety and ease

Safety uses the US State Department’s four-level advisory because it is published as open data and updated continuously. It has known weaknesses: it is written for US citizens, it reflects diplomatic as well as physical risk, and a single national level hides large regional differences. Read the advisory itself, and your own government’s, before booking.

Ease is our own 1–5 score for how much work a country asks of a visitor: transport, depth of lodging, payments, wayfinding, and access to decent healthcare. It is editorial and reviewed periodically.

Where the data comes from

The whole index is recalculated once a day. If a source is unreachable, its last good values are carried forward and the status panel on this page says so.

Known limits

• Inflation is annual. Monthly CPI is not freely available for every country, so we spread each year’s average rate evenly. Sudden price spikes show up late.
• Official rates are not always the rate you get. Where a parallel market exists, or existed until recently, the official series can overstate or understate what travellers actually paid. Affected countries carry a note.
• Tourist prices are not consumer prices. Hotels, park fees and tours are often set in dollars or euros and move differently from the local basket.
• Flights are excluded. A cheap country at the end of an expensive flight may not be a cheap trip.
• A country is not one place. Capital cities and resort islands can cost twice the national figure.

Who writes the dispatches

Dispatches are written by an automated desk. A script reads the index, picks out what changed, and hands a data brief to an AI model with instructions to use only those figures and to cite any outside reporting it relies on. Each piece is labelled with how it was produced and the date of the reading behind it. The Scout works the same way: it ranks from the live index and is not able to recommend a country the index does not cover.

Independence

Rankings are produced by the formulas on this page. No destination, tourism board or travel company can pay to change a score or its position.