How we cost a trip
Every figure on TripPay carries its source and the date it was last checked. Where a number is an estimate rather than a verified price, the page says so.
Current status: pre-launch. Every destination record on this site is still populated with placeholder estimates rather than verified prices. Nothing here should be used to budget a real trip yet. The confidence badges on each page tell you exactly which figures are which.
What a cost record contains
A destination is not an article, it is a structured record. Every price in it is stored with four things attached: the currency it was quoted in, the date it was checked, the source it came from, and how much we trust it. Pages are generated from those records, which is why the provenance block at the bottom of each page is generated too rather than written by hand.
- Daily costs — accommodation, food & drink, local transport, activities & entry fees, each at three travel styles.
- One-off costs — connectivity, airport transfers, internal transport, mandatory levies.
- Airfare — round-trip, per departure city, with the low/typical/high booking spread.
- Visa — by passport, because the fee follows your passport and not your departure airport.
- Seasonality — month-by-month multipliers for lodging and airfare separately.
The three travel styles
Three, not five. More tiers than this cannot be kept consistent across destinations, and pretending otherwise would be false precision.
- Backpacker
- Hostel dorms and guesthouses, street food and local canteens, public buses and shared transport.
- Mid-range
- Private room in a 3-star hotel or good guesthouse, a mix of local and sit-down restaurants, occasional taxis.
- Comfort
- 4-star hotels or well-reviewed boutique stays, restaurant meals, private transfers and paid tours.
How confidence is graded
| Grade | What it means |
|---|---|
| verified | We or a named source checked this specific price on the date shown. |
| sampled | A median from a real listing sample, with the sample size recorded. |
| estimated | Reasoned from adjacent data. An honest guess, and flagged as one. |
A page inherits the lowest confidence of any line in it. One estimated figure makes the whole page estimated, because a total built on one guess is a guess.
Why we ask where you are flying from
For most long-haul trips airfare is the largest single line in the budget, and it varies more by departure city than everything else combined. A single average figure for "the cost of Vietnam" blends a direct Delhi flight with a one-stop New York routing and describes neither. So destination pages give you the on-the-ground number, and the origin pages add your airfare and your visa.
What we do not claim
- These are not quotes. Prices move. Every page shows the date its figures were last checked so you can judge how stale they are.
- Exchange rates are not live. The current table dates from October 2026 (Static table — pending live feed). This is the weakest part of the pipeline and is shown on every page that converts currency.
- Visa rules change without notice. We record them because they are part of the cost, but the official source for your passport always wins.
- We round. A total presented to the rupee would imply precision we do not have, so figures are rounded by magnitude.
Photography
Photographs are illustrative. They are never the evidence for a number, and no figure on this site depends on one. All images are used under the Pexels licence, which permits commercial use without attribution; we credit anyway.
| Used on | Photographer | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Filippo Peisino | Pexels |
| Vietnam | Quang Nguyen Vinh | Pexels |
| Thailand | jaspreet kaur | Pexels |
| Bali | Jess Ho | Pexels |
Coverage
3 destinations · 6 departure cities · 18 costed routes. All records currently estimate-grade.