Which countries are the cheapest to travel to in 2025? Exclusive HelloSafe ranking of 131 countries

Methodology

Aim of the study

This study was carried out on the basis of multiple sources, all of which were taken into account in order to provide as accurate a picture as possible of the average travel budget required for a tourist stay for one person in a given country. The aim is to be able to offer an estimate of the budget per day that corresponds as closely as possible for each country studied to the reality of the places that tourists visit during their stay.

Categories of expenditure taken into account

This budget includes expenditure made by the traveller on site in the destination country, i.e. :

1. 1. Accommodation costs (hotel or Airbnb-type reservation)
2. 2. Food expenses (based on local CPI indices and restaurant costs)
3. 3. Transport costs within the country (plane, train, bus, other public transport or taxi)
4. 4. Expenditure on visits and tourist activities on site

Conversely, this budget does not include the cost of transport to the destination country (typically the cost of a plane ticket).

Methodological choices

The way in which a travel budget is put together can obviously vary according to a large number of criteria: the standard of accommodation and restaurants, different costs from one town to another or from one region to another within the same country, the type of transport preferred in the destination country, and so on. In order to arrive at a figure that is as representative as possible of the budget needed to travel in a given country over a given period, we have taken two approaches into account in our calculation algorithms:

1. 1. Objective approach: using an artificial intelligence module developed in-house by HelloSafe, our algorithms have analysed tens of thousands of accommodation, restaurant and transport offers in each of the countries mentioned in the study, enabling us to establish average budget levels in each of the expenditure categories that are representative of the country as a whole and of the different standings available.
2. 2. Subjective approach: we wanted the study to be equally representative of what tourists actually do in a given country. For example, if a majority of travellers to Egypt choose to take a cruise on the Nile, we believe that this specific tourist characteristic should be taken into account from a statistical point of view. To do this, we have based ourselves on the data made available by the Budget My Trip and Numbeo websites, whose method consists of allowing thousands of travellers to report the prices they observe and pay on the spot. These on-the-ground figures provide invaluable insight into the reality of what travellers actually pay in a given country.

It is therefore by taking these two approaches into account that we are able to propose the figures presented in this study.

Details and limitations

It is important to remember that the data presented in this study are estimates, and are by no means absolute. As we have said, planning a travel budget is a complex exercise that depends above all on individual choices and trade-offs. Nevertheless, the methodology we have used has enabled us to get as close as possible to a figure that we consider representative for all the countries for which we have been able to obtain sufficient data.