How we calibrate budgets + stats

The three tiers

Every guide shows three daily totals: Backpacker (🎒), Mid-range (🧳), and Luxury (💎). The same labels cover four per-day categories in the cost calculator (stay, food, transit, activities), so you can mix and match — e.g. pay for a nicer room but eat where locals eat.

🎒 Backpacker — what it buys you

• Stay: hostel dorm bed or a basic guesthouse / cheapest 2-star room. Shared bathrooms are likely.
• Food: street food, markets, self-catering from supermarkets, one sit-down meal a day at most.
• Transit: buses, the metro, overnight trains. Walking when it's faster. No taxis.
• Activities: free or cheap — public parks, free museum days, self-guided walks, one paid attraction every few days.

🧳 Mid-range — what it buys you

• Stay: 3-star hotel or a well-reviewed Airbnb / private room. Consistent, comfortable, nothing fancy.
• Food: neighborhood restaurants, a mix of casual and one nicer dinner. Coffee-shop breakfasts.
• Transit: transit cards, occasional rideshare, airport express. A rental car for natural / island destinations.
• Activities: 1–2 paid attractions per day, a guided day tour every few days, one splurge experience.

💎 Luxury — what it buys you

• Stay: 4- or 5-star hotel, boutique resort, or top-tier rental. Often in a prime-location district.
• Food: fine-dining dinners, tasting menus where they exist, high-end cocktail bars, hotel breakfast.
• Transit: taxis or private car door-to-door, premium train classes, no bus commitments.
• Activities: private guides, premium experiences (hot-air balloon, Michelin-adjacent cooking class, helicopter tours where they exist).

Daily-budget $/day numbers

Each destination has a hand-calibrated triple — e.g. Bangkok is { budget: 25, mid_range: 60, luxury: 180 }. These aren't pulled from a single API; they're editorial judgements cross-checked against:

• current hotel prices at the tier implied above, sampled in shoulder season, averaged across 3–5 neighbourhoods
• typical food costs from the guide's own Typical Costs table (street meal, mid-range dinner, wine glass, coffee)
• regional transit passes / rideshare averages where the data's reliable
• for safari / remote island / polar destinations, the all-inclusive package price divided by daily nights

The cost_index(a 1–100 number you'll see in some charts) is a separate abstract measure of overall cost of living. It usually tracks mid_range $/day closely, but diverges when a destination has unusual structure — e.g. Botswana's Okavango Delta sits at cost_index 90 but real mid-range $/day is $800 because of all-inclusive safari lodge pricing. In that case, trust the dollar number.

How the split is allocated

Inside each tier's daily total, we split spending across four buckets: stay / food / transit / activities. The base split is roughly 42 / 25 / 15 / 18, then shifts per destination:

• Expensive cities skew more toward accommodation (Tokyo, Paris, London).
• Walkable cities need less transit budget, more activity budget.
• Cheap-food destinations with standout food scenes (Bangkok, Oaxaca, Hanoi, Penang) bump food share.
• National parks and islands bump activities + transit (tours, transfers, rental gear), trim food + stay.
• Multi-stop regions/countries bump transit (intercity movement).

That gives each destination a distinctive stack — a Paris day tilts toward stay, a Bangkok day toward food, a Banff day toward activities — rather than every city showing the same pie chart.

FIFA-style stat cards

Each destination page shows a stat card with 9 attributes on a 0–99 scale: safety, affordability, food, culture, nightlife, walkability, nature, connectivity, transit. These are not votes or survey scores — they're derived from the same underlying data that drives comparisons and badges.

• Safety maps the destination's safety index (1–100) directly; the floor is 35.
• Food / culture / nightlife / walkability / transit / connectivity / nature come from a per-attribute 1–5 scale, mapped linearly onto an attribute-specific band (e.g. food spans 45–90, transit spans 42–85). A small curated top tierof cities (e.g. Tokyo + Bangkok + Paris + Lyon for food, Rome + Kyoto + Paris + Istanbul for culture) gets an explicit bonus so the apex of each scale reads as world-class, not just "good." Most destinations land in the 55–85 band.
• Naturefor cities is capped at 65 unless the city is on a short list of genuinely nature-adjacent urban hubs (Cape Town, Queenstown, Rio, Vancouver, Reykjavik, etc.). National parks, islands, and regions don't get that cap.
• Overall is a weighted composite — safety 16%, culture 15%, food 14%, nature 13%, walkability 11%, transit 10%, affordability 9%, nightlife 7%, connectivity 5%. When a playstyle is active, those weights shift.

Affordability score

Affordability is derived from the mid-range $/day number (the most tangible version of a destination's cost), using a piecewise curve:

• $50/day → 95 (backpacker belt — Hanoi, Yogyakarta, Varanasi, Chefchaouen)
• $75/day → 87
• $100/day → 78
• $130/day → 68
• $170/day → 55
• $220/day → 45
• $300/day → 38
• $500+/day → 32 (Maldives, Bora Bora, Serengeti lodges)

This means the "Most Affordable" badge and the "Best Under $50/day" badge both key off concrete dollar numbers — they aren't an abstract cost index.

What these numbers aren't

• They aren't forecasts. Prices move — currency shifts, seasonal spikes, new taxes. Use mid-range $/day as a planning anchor, not a booking guarantee. The cost calculator lets you mix tiers per category, which is closer to how most people actually travel.
• They assume shoulder season. Peak-season hotels can run 2–3× the mid-range number in cities like Reykjavik, Santorini, or Kyoto during cherry blossom.
• They assume two travelers sharing a room. The cost calculator adjusts for solo / three+ automatically using one room per pair.
• The FIFA stats are editorial calibration, not crowd data.They're designed so the top of each category feels defensible to someone who's been there. If a score looks wrong to you, that's useful feedback — tell us and we'll look at it.