As I wrote a few posts back in the midst of a return to Turkey, this country is not a cheap destination anymore. It’s in my book still as an honorable mention because it’s a fair value for mid-range travelers, but it will probably disappear from that category too next time around. Overall, prices are ticking closer and closer to those in Western Europe and with their economy booming (while Europe’s languishes), there’s little chance this trend will reverse.

Minimum wage is only about $500 a month and pensions aren’t much higher, but there are plenty in the sizable middle class making a few thousand more than that each month. Taxes are not outrageous, but fuel costs are, so transportation is no bargain. The conservative government loves sin taxes, to the point that 2/3 of what you spend on booze or beer does not go to the manufacturer or retailer. Even once-cheap raki, the national drink of choice, is pricey. Real estate prices are rising rapidly, which affects store rentals and hotel costs.

What the government ministers are driving in Ankara.

Turkey is an amazing destination though, so it still feels like a special experience worth paying for, even if you are sharing that experience with more and more people each year. The cruise ship traffic is up 108 percent year over year, for instance, which nearly always has a negative effect on both prices and crowds. Most of that traffic is in Istanbul, with perhaps a stop off to check out Ephesus, so in this big country it’s not hard to get away from the crowds. Hotel costs are especially high in Istanbul, where 50 100+ room hotels are under construction or about to break ground.

I was just in Istanbul and Ankara on this last trip, so prices here are based on what you find in the two biggest cities. You can expect many of them to go down as you get into the countryside. All prices have been converted into U.S. dollars at the rate of 1.7 Turkish Lira per $.

Food & Drink Prices in Turkey
In-season fruits & vegetables at markets: $1.30 – $2 per kilo
Simit (kind of like a sesame bagel with a bigger hole) – 60 cents
5 small pastries from a simit dealer: $1
Large baguette: 60 cents
200 grams of baklava: – $2 – $3.50
Doner kebab sandwich: $2.50 – $5
Cigar kofte (ground lamb) – $1 per stick
Glass of strong tea – $1 – $1.30
Cappuccino – $2 – $3.50
Bottle of Turkish wine in a store: $5.50 to $15 for most, but some up to $35.
Liter bottle of raki in a store: $25 and up
Large Efes beer in a store/bar: $2-$2.50 / $4-$6
100 grams of peanuts or hazelnuts – 80 cents
100 grams of shelled pistachios – $1.50
Meal in a basic Turkish restaurant – $6 – $10
Meal in a fancy Turkish restaurant – about what you pay in the U.S., NYC prices at gourmet/hotel ones
Kilo of tea – $8
Ice cream novelty: 50 cents to $1.40

Hotel & Hostel Prices
Dorm room bed in a hostel: $22 – $35
Basic double room with bath – $45 – $70
3/4- star hotel on Hotwire: $95 – $165

Transportation Costs in Turkey
Taxi from airport to Istanbul center: $24 – $29
Airport bus to Taksim: $6.50
Metro/tram combo from airport: $2 – $3
Metro/tram local fare: $1.20 per trip (with Istanbulkart)
Istanbul ferry ride: 80 cents – $1.50
Ankara city bus ride: $1
Taxi ride in Ankara: $2 – $18
Long-distance bus ride: around $3 per hour of travel
Istanbul to Cappadocia by overnight bus: $38
High-speed train from Ankara to Konya (1.5 hours at 300 kms per hour): $17 – $23
Istanbul to Izmir by fast ferry & train combo: $39
Internal flights: $75 – $200 one-way

Admission and Activity Charges
Top-tier sites in Istanbul: $15
Second level sites: $9
Bosphorus tour by boat: $15
Small museums: $3 – $5
Mosques: free

By the way, cellular charges here are a good deal. To compare to what you pay at home, for about $15 – $18 a month you can get 500 minutes, 1000 text messages, and 1GB of data.

So what’s the strategy here? How can you avoid spending a fortune?
- Choose your restaurants carefully in the cities and cook sometimes if you can (produce is a bargain).
- Eat lots of nuts and fruit, which are abundant all year.
- Pick and choose which sites will get you excited and skip the others.
- Explore Istanbul by ferry as the rides are cheap, including to the Princes Islands.
- Turkey is not just Istanbul (unless you’re on a cruise). Take a bus to cheaper lands.
- Figure out the public transportation routes and methods. Taxis are expensive.
- Save your hard partying for elsewhere, a country where taxes aren’t 2/3 of the cost.

Turkey is dynamic, exciting, and has with a few thousand years of history on display. It’s filled with terrific food and interesting people.

The days of bargain prices are long gone, however.

When I was a young strapping lad out circling the globe for the first time, my girlfriend and I planned to teach English in Greece when funds got low, but ended up in Istanbul instead. This was a quick pivot based on what we found within 24 hours in Istanbul after coming from Athens: it was easier to get a job in Turkey and we could enjoy a more interesting life on the cheap. Our salaries were low, but so were the costs. Inflation was terrible—so terrible that if I remember right we got three raises in five months—but it remained affordable when we went shopping in the street market in our neighborhood and we were having fun, so all was well.

This was back in the mid-1990s, when you were an instant millionaire as soon as you changed money into Turkish lira: there was actually a million lira banknote and it wasn’t worth very much. We would get a whole stack of them on payday. But hey, for a dollar you could get a large doner kebab sandwich, or four simits, a couple beers in a store, or a round-trip train ride into the center from our suburb town.

Alas, a lot can change in 17 years when it comes to a country’s economic health. Just look at Peru, Thailand, Cambodia, or Brazil on the upside. Spain and Ireland on the downside. Argentina down then up then down.

Turkey is a lot wealthier and healthier these days than when my now-wife and I spent months there around 17 years ago. They chopped zeros off the currency, reformed or sold many state-run enterprises, tamed inflation, and put exports into hyperdrive. On the surface this translates in a lot of ways: more cars, newer cars, better roads, city metros, high-speed rail, a great airline people actually enjoy flying, new bridges.

It also means higher wages and higher costs for nearly everything.

In general, many prices are similar now to what you would see in the U.S., with only a few things being significantly less. The cheaper items can generally be grouped under food and labor: agricultural products, simple restaurant meals, basic services like a haircut or shoeshine. Gasoline costs what it does in Western Europe, however, which translates into high costs for anything transportation related. For a traveler in Turkey, that’s a bummer. So is the price of beer and wine: the Islamist party in power has turned the tax screws on anything alcoholic. (On the plus side, cigarettes too, so the country is not the giant ashtray it once was and buses aren’t filled with second-hand smoke.)

As I said in the new edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations, Turkey is still a decent value for mid-range travelers. You can find reasonably priced 3-star hotels, affordable meals, good prices on interesting souvenirs if you bargain, and admission prices that will sting but are still lower than many other European capitals. And it’s fair to say that there’s more worth seeing and experiencing in Istanbul than almost any other city in the world.

I’m glad to be back and I highly recommend coming here and then exploring other areas of the country. Just don’t expect to do it on a shoestring budget, even if you’re couchsurfing. In the book The Next 100 Years, the author predicted Turkey is going to be a major power on the world stage within the next 50 years, one of the top four or five players within a century. True or not, it’s definitely a place on the way up, not heading down or sideways. A rising sea may not really lift all boats, but it’s lifting a lot of them and you’re going to pay more to tread their turf.

Remember how much and how fast things can change in a destination when some friend or virtual friend gives you advice based on their experience in the destination. The first question should probably be, “When were you there?”

This Christmas and New Year’s Day I’m home with my immediate family, no traveling, just a normal holiday time. For us, “normal” this year is lighting a menorah one week and then putting up a Christmas tree the next. Then going to a restaurant overlooking Clearwater Beach for brunch on Christmas day. But compared to some past years…

The photo below was two Decembers ago, when we lived in Mexico. My daughter introduced her Mexican friends to our tradition of baking cookies. (We had an oven, which is kind of a novelty there.)

In Mexico the big holiday is Three Kings Day, the 12th day of Christmas. First we went to the local mall, where the kings paraded through on people in camel suits—that’s a photo from it at the top. Then that night we went to a real parade through downtown, with floats and bands and people throwing candy.

The Three Kings were the rock stars of the show. My favorites were the local beauty queens dressed up like Angels, though the ones dressed up like some Arabian Nights harem fantasy were fun too.

At night, our daughter was told to leave her shoes outside the door and the kings would put presents in them. She left some snacks in a bowl, with a note in Spanish to the kings. In the morning, score!

When my wife and I lived in South Korea teaching English, Christmas was a whirl of neon lights, electronic Santa gadgets, and cheesy music. All the commercialism, without much of that pesky religious part.

Mostly I remember hanging out with the other teachers we knew in Seoul and partying. In other words, it was just another typical day off, but with better food. One teacher was ex-military and had bought a turkey from the U.S. army base store. We drank wine instead of our usual crappy Korean beer.

I did get to dress up as Santa for the Wonderland school performance with my youngest class. (Yes, the school where we taught was called Wonderland.) I’m not exactly round, so that was the first and last time for that.

The place we taught English the first time was Istanbul, Turkey. Christmas there was…non-existent. I don’t have one photo from there that has anything to do with that holiday—only New Year’s Eve.

We went to a buffet brunch at the local Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza because it was the only place in our neighborhood with any hint of the holidays in place. We dined on food from home near what was probably the only Christmas tree in a 10-mile radius. Then we did what most expats seem to do over the holidays when living abroad: meet up with each other somewhere to drink. In our suburb of Istanbul, however, that meant beers with some Turkish friends in the mix too, at the Yesel Ev bar—-Green House.

If was a different story for their big holiday: Ramadan. That involved being woken up each morning by a guy beating a drum in the streets, eating meals hidden from the public view during daylight hours so we wouldn’t offend anyone, and eating lots of candy at the end.

What are your holiday memories in foreign places around the world?

The 4th edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations goes into production phase this week and will be out in January. Here’s a sneak peek at the front cover.

Lots of things have changed in the world since I released the first edition a decade ago, though not all that much since the 2009 edition. Most of the big price changes came about from currency fluctuations and a rising middle class in developing countries. Thailand, India, and Indonesia have a far larger percentage of people doing more than just getting by than they had even three years ago, but in India’s case prices haven’t budged much at the low end because of currency declines.

Prices have risen at the budget end in some countries (like Morocco and Thailand), but have stayed roughly the same for mid-range travelers on vacation. In others, major line items for backpackers have actually gone down because there are more hostels/guesthouses serving budget travelers and more buses plying the backpacker routes. Competition is usually a good thing, so that has opened up more good choices at a good price in Cambodia, Laos, Romania, Hungary, and Nicaragua.

Welcome Slovakia!

As far as in/out changes in the book, I replaced Turkey with Slovakia, removed Argentina, and gave Cambodia a full chapter instead of it being an “honorable mention.” Acting like a mutual fund portfolio manager, when the price gets too high relative to value, I have to get out. Turkey and Argentina are still good values for mid-range travelers, but they’re getting too pricey for long-term backpackers. Argentina’s fiscal house of cards could implode any month now though, so if that happens it’s 2001 all over again.

If you’d like to get some perspective on which countries are the cheapest places to travel in the world (and are worth visiting too), see this interview with me that Gadling published last week. Looking back, I visited eight of the countries in this 4th edition just in the last eight months. Whew!

$8.50 dorm, $28 double room in Turkey

I just did a post over at Uptake.com on the differences in hotel prices between big cities and smaller cities in the United States. It’s easy to compare apples to apples in this country because the market is so dominated by chain hotels that don’t vary much. Sure, there are differences around the margins, but it’s hard to tell when you wake up in a Hilton or Courtyard by Marriott whether you’re in Albany or Anaheim.

The differences can be pretty shocking. A Courtyard by Marriott standard room in Tampa is $109. In New York City it’s $409 for the same kind of room on the same weekend. A Hampton Inn room that’s $148 in Omaha is $405 in San Francisco. (Who’s paying that?! They need to learn how to use Hotwire.)

But what about the rest of the world at the budget end of the scale? How much difference does it make when staying in a big city compared to a much smaller one? Even in some developing countries, there’s a big underlying cost difference because of real estate prices, taxes, and labor costs. So how do hostel prices stack up? I looked up the same random weekend in May on Hostelworld and Hostelbookers. Here’s what I found. All prices are per person, per night. So double the price here for a private room for two.

$16 double room in India

India – Mumbai
Shared dorm – $14 to $22
Private room – $15 to $40+

India – Jaisalmer
Shared dorm – $1 to $10
Private room – $3.60 to twelve choices under $10

Turkey – Istanbul
Shared dorm – $11 to $33
Private room – $16 to $34

Turkey – Goreme
Shared dorm – $6 to $16
Private room – $11 to twelve choices under $20

Vietnam – Hanoi
Shared dorm – $5 to $12
Private room – $4 to $35 (most under $10)

Vietnam – Sapa
Shared dorm – $4 to $9
Private Room – $4 to $10

How well does this correlation hold up when we look at five or six other places? Much better in expensive countries than in most cheap ones it turns out. Prices in Buenos Aires are as good or better than what you’ll pay in Salta or Mendoza. The same is true of Quito, Budapest, or Kuala Lumpur. The reason for this is that there’s much more of a tourism infrastructure in the capital and therefore much more competition. If you own the only hostel in some small town, you have a lot more pricing power. When you’re competing with 30 others, you are subject to market forces.

So in general, if you’re in an expensive country, you should limit your time in the main city to seeing what you want to see and getting business done. Then hop the train/bus out of London, Paris, or Sydney. In many of The World’s Cheapest Destinations, however, it doesn’t make all that much difference unless it’s an out-of-whack place like Mumbai. Stay in Bangkok for the food and nightlife if you want, soak up the scene in Sofia for a week if you feel like it. So this is another budget advantage to picking the right destinations: you don’t have to hightail it out of the big city because accommodation is too expensive. So you only leave fast when it’s a pit like Jakarta or Guatemala City and there’s no good reason to stick around anyway.

Like this post? Get the RSS stream and see regular updates from the Cheapest Destinations Blog.