I’ve been publishing the costs of various trips I’ve been on on my blog for a while now, but I’ve decided to change how I do it going forward.

In the past, I have published the cost of each individual trip. This means flights plus expenses through each country I traveled through on that trip – sometimes quite a few!  As my trips have been getting longer and longer, I’ve decided that this likely isn’t the most effective way to communicate this information anymore.

What I’m going to be doing going forward is talking about the cost of each individual country and documenting the average cost over all of my visits on the newly created Country Cost page. The page is accessible in the top menu of my site and will also be linked to in posts where I talk about the cost of traveling to a specific country.

Any country that I visit for longer than a week (or maybe 10 days) will get a dedicated post about the cost of visiting that country, but any country visited for a shorter time will just be updated on the Country Cost page.

Now, I’m also changing what is and is not being included in the cost of traveling somewhere. Namely, flight costs will no longer be included! I may mention the cost of my flights in dedicated posts about the country, but I will not be including the cost of flights on the Country Cost page unless the flight is wholly within one country (i.e. Barcelona to Madrid would be included, Madrid to Paris would not be included). Why is this? Well, because the costs of traveling between countries varies so much. I often fly from Detroit when I’m flying from the US but someone who flies from New York is almost always going to have a less expensive flight when going to Europe. Likewise, someone flying from LA will almost always have a less expensive flight when flying to Asia, all else equal.

This new way of tracking costs will give you a good idea of the cost of traveling in an area after you are already there. Until you get there, costs are up to how flexible you are, where you are traveling from, what class of service you are looking to fly, whether or not you use frequent flyer miles, etc.

All UN countries will be included, as well as areas that I deem to require separation from their country including islands in the Caribbean, Hong Kong and Taiwan from China, etc.

In my dedicated posts about each country, I will do my best to outline what style of travel I took on while I was there. I tend of be more on the budget-side of things, as many of you who read my blog know, but occasionally I like to splurge a little bit.

From time to time, I may accept the costs of traveling to a country from another traveler, like my blog contributor, Anya. Whenever I do this, it will be notated, and I will only include costs for travelers that I consider to travel in a similar style as I do.

I’ve also gone back and added the costs of previous trips to the Country Cost page to the best of my ability.

Let me know if you have any recommendations in regard to learning about the costs of traveling to different countries going forward and I’ll do my best to address them!