Whenever the subject of traveling the world comes up I hear the same refrain – “Travel is so expensive”

Well – yes. But also – no.

Short term travel is expensive. 

The high cost of travel that people complain about is actually the high cost of expedience and convenience. 

Nightly hotel costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than monthly apartment rentals. I was comparing AirBnB’s in a specific city and with a 30 day stay I could easily find places within our US$700 monthly housing budget (US$23 per night or less). If I cut back to 14 days the cheapest I could find was around US$75 per night (US$1,094 for 14 night stay) and it looked a little shady, TBH. If we were signing a 12 month lease there were several decent looking apartments available under US$500 per month.

Tourist area restaurants are more expensive than the places the locals hang out in and groceries for home cooked meals are cheaper still. You can’t do much cooking in a hotel room and it’s tough to find the best spots for good value when you’re only staying a few days so I feel like food costs increase inversely to length of stay. We used to go to Vegas frequently and found that for what it costs 2 people to have a decent meal on the strip you could Uber to Summerlin or Paradise and get a nice meal for 4 but it’s a bigger TIME commitment. 

Rental cars are expensive, there’s really no getting around that. But if you’re staying somewhere for weeks then you can probably get around by public transport. (I mean, not in the US, obviously; our system sucks in 99% of cities.) 

From Pisa, Italy I can rent a car for a day trip to visit Florence for around $140 (plus fuel, tolls, parking and added stress) or I can take the train (2 hour trip versus 1-1/2 hour drive) for about $12 per person and stay overnight in one of a dozen hotels for less than $100. So I get 2 days in Florence for basically the same money.

It also appears that ride-share options (Uber type arrangements) and taxis are far less expensive. One AirBnB review I read for a place in Panama they complained that it was a $2 taxi ride to get into town (about a mile and a half per google maps). Around here the meter starts at $5 just to get into the cab and then time/mileage adds onto that. The cheapest possible adult ticket for Tri-Met in Portland, OR is $1; in Panama city the metro is $0.35 per trip and the most expensive bus ticket is $1.25 for the routes that take a toll road; otherwise a bus ticket is $0.25

Airfare is a big consideration when traveling internationally, too. If you want to go on a specific date and return on a specific date a week or two in the future, you’re at their mercy, right? But, if you want to go ‘sometime in November’ and leave ‘sometime in February, sort of approximately 90 days later’ you can find some pretty cheap flights. If you are on a tight schedule between cities or countries you may be forced to fly in order to maximize your time on site. If you have time there are trains and buses available for a fraction of the cost. We can fly from Panama to Costa Rica in a couple of hours for a couple hundred bucks each. Or we can take a 12 hour overnight bus ride for $25 each. If we only get to spend 89 days in Costa Rica instead of 90, well, it ain’t that big a deal. If your choice is 6 days instead of 7, maybe you’ll have to pay for the convenience and time savings.

In the forums I follow for digital nomads and solo travelers I find many examples of people who are living and working internationally on budgets of US$1,000 to US$2,000 per month. A lot of them utilize hostels and co-living arrangements to cut their accommodation expense (which is something we have aged out of – sharing a bathroom with strangers? That’s a hard pass, LOL) but if you are living on US$1,500 staying in hostels the reality is that you would only be adding maybe $300 to your monthly expenses to upgrade to a studio or 1 bedroom apartment.

On the other hand, in my humble opinion, the cost of NOT traveling is horrendously high. The most closed-minded and inflexible people I have met over the years have generally been people who have never been anywhere.