How we price a trip

Travel budgeting content has a credibility problem. Half of it is aspirational nonsense ("I did Europe on $10 a day" and the $10 was a gift card), and the other half is so hedged it's useless. We built PriceMyTrip around one idea: a daily budget should look like a receipt, and every line on a receipt has to be a real number someone can actually pay.

Here's how the numbers get made.

1. No price prints without multiple sources

Every line item gets checked across independent sources: local operator pages, current traveler reports, booking platforms, official sites where they exist. One blog post from 2019 is not a price; it's an anecdote. When our sources agree, we print the number. When they don't, we keep digging or we don't print it.

2. When sources disagree, the conservative number wins

Real example from our Hanoi receipt: half the internet still says the Temple of Literature costs 30,000 VND to enter. The most-cited current price is 70,000. We printed 70,000. A budget that breaks in your favor is a pleasant surprise; a budget that breaks against you is a lie with formatting. We would rather you land in Hanoi and find your day costs less than the receipt said.

3. The exchange rate is printed, not implied

Every receipt states its conversion basis (Hanoi's runs at roughly 26,000 VND to the dollar, as of July 2026). Currencies drift, and a "cheap" destination can quietly become 15% more expensive without a single local price changing. If you're reading a receipt a year from now, the printed rate tells you exactly how stale it might be.

4. One city, three receipts

"What does Hanoi cost?" has three honest answers, so our receipts come in tiers: shoestring (dorm bed, walk more), standard (private room, the receipt we film), and comfort (air-con, sit-down dinners, Grab cars). Same city, same pho, different totals. Tiers are how you kill "it depends" without pretending everyone travels the same way.

5. Every receipt carries a buffer line

Our Hanoi receipt includes $3.50 labeled "laundry, a mango, the alley you got lost in." That's not padding; it's realism. A budget with zero slack is a budget you'll abandon by day three, and then the whole receipt was theater. Real days contain a wrong turn and an unplanned snack. We price them in.

6. Estimates get flagged, out loud

Sometimes an item won't verify to our standard. On our street-food day, the grilled banana is marked as a typical figure rather than a verified range, right there in the text. If we can't verify it, you get told. The alternative (quietly mixing verified and guessed numbers) poisons the whole receipt.

7. Every receipt says where it breaks

A price is only true somewhere. Hanoi's Old Quarter tourist strips run 20 to 30% above the street prices one block away, and the airport taxi costs eleven times the bus. Each breakdown ships with a "where this budget breaks" section, because knowing the failure modes is worth more than the average.

8. Receipts get re-checked, and say so

Street prices drift. Every page carries its verification date, and receipts get re-verified rather than left to rot. If a receipt is a year old, the footer will admit it.

And the money part, disclosed

Some pages here carry affiliate links (travel insurance, and in future, tours and transport). The rules we hold ourselves to: every affiliate link is disclosed on the page it appears on, we only link things that actually fit the budget tier we're writing about, and no price on a receipt is ever shaped by whether we earn from it. The receipt is the product; the links only survive if the receipts stay honest.