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Week Around the Ists
Inspired by the latest Mercer HR rankings of the world's most expensive cities for expats, Rob Meyer of the GoBudgetTravel blog (a pretty new site apparently ... but we still need a proxy to access it for some reason) has put together a similar ranking of the least-expensive cities in the world for budget travellers.
The two variables he used in determining the Budget Cost per Day for each of the 94 cities in his study are:
1. The cheapest private, double occupancy room that I could find in each city. (private rooms, as they were the most commonly available accommodation options I found across the board. This does not mean that these are the cheapest of all accommodation options, as a dorm style accommodation is certainly less expensive when available. However, for comparison purposes it made more sense to just look at private rooms.)
2. The price of a cheap local meal in each city, multiplied by 2. Meant to represent the cost of two meals per day.
All expenses were derived from either his personal experiences, information provided by his fellow backpacker friends, HostelBookers.com (accommodation prices), HostelWorld.com (accommodation prices), and the Lonely Planet World Guide (cheap meal prices).
So Shanghai ranked 26th on the expensive list and 16th on the cheap list. Guess it is true how Shanghai can both be expensive or cheap depending on your lifestyle! And here the rankings:
Image from shieken.
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Just what kind of accommodations are being factored? Hostels?
Hi, this is Rob Meyer, the writer of the original survey. Yes, as you can see the accommodations are quite inexpensive. The survey is a comparison of Budget Travel costs in 94 cities around the world, so I basically compared accommodation in each city by the cheapest (while still safe, and acceptable) private rooms available in each city (usually found in hostels). I then added the cost of two cheap local meals to the cost of accommodation to get a kind of "bare bones" budget travel cost per day for each city, which is the figured used to compare each city with the others around the world. Shanghai ranked 16th according to this criteria.
This actually makes sense, because even though Shanghai is an expensive city to live in while conforming to international standards of comfort (this is what the Mercer HR study looked at), much of it's and China's recent prosperity can be attributed to the vast pool of cheap labor available. Therefore cities such as Shanghai and Beijing have developed in a way that can support wage workers (with budget accommodations, food, etc.) as well as the international business elite (as is reflected in the Mercer HR study).
Hope you find this comment helpful, please let me know if you have any other questions or comments about the survey! Go Budget Travel .com
Hi, this is Sean Zhang,a Shanghai local resident,Chinese.My English is not good,but I hope my suggestion could be helpful to you all.
I think the expenses in Shanghai is too low for a budget traveller,even lower than most Chinese travellers.Especially on $1 a day for meal,then what you eat?? You can't only have Chinese breads(Mantou) for a whole day?? Also, the list neglect the transpotation fee, which could be at least 20% of your daily expense in Shanghai.The resonable budget for a day I suggest is $20($10 accom+$6 meal+$4 transpotation),believe it or not.