01
Currency appreciation
54.5%A stronger local currency raises visitor-facing USD prices.
Elasticity 0.74 · 95% interval 0.45 to 1.03Data interactive • July 2026
Jack's Travel
Affordability Index
Where your travel dollar goes furthest, across every UN country and 69 major cities.
A place can be cheap for a visitor even when life is expensive for the people who live there. This index isolates the first question: how much does a tourist paying in U.S. dollars face on the ground?
195countries
69cities
46observed anchors
9.1%visitor model test error
The reading
Cheap is a currency story first.
Egypt, India and Indonesia are the clearest inexpensive choices in the top tier because all three are directly observed. Syria ranks first in the model, but its grade D result reflects stale inputs, war, and exchange-rate distortion. A low index value is not a travel recommendation.
Japan is a useful rich-country case. Yen weakness makes it relatively inexpensive for dollar earners even though it remains a high-income economy. Switzerland is the reverse: strong wages help residents, while visitors face the world's highest modeled price level.
What moves the index
The tourist price equation
Measured importance among the causal channels in the model. This explains change in visitor-facing prices, not the full level of every country's score.
02
Moderate inflation
22.1%Estimate is noisy below roughly 10% annual inflation.
Elasticity 0.50 · 95% interval -0.16 to 1.1603
High-inflation excess
23.3%Inflation above roughly 10% sharply raises local prices.
Elasticity 1.43 · 95% interval 1.16 to 1.71 Working rule
A 10% currency appreciation is associated with roughly a 7.4% rise in dollar prices, before local price responses.
The full country index
Find your next destination
Index 100 equals the U.S. visitor price level. A score of 50 suggests a comparable basket costs about half as much. Airfare is excluded.
| Rank | Country | Price index | Range | Grade | Compare |
|---|
Side by side
Compare up to three countries
The city reality
69 cities, where trips actually happen
National averages hide the gap between Cairo and Zurich, or New York and the rest of the United States. The city index combines a broad urban basket with country-level Big Mac evidence.
| Rank | City | Country | Price index | Grade |
|---|
How to read it
A compass, not a quote from a hotel desk
What is measured
A U.S. dollar-facing consumer price index, anchored to the United States at 100. It combines Deutsche Bank and Numbeo city baskets, standardized Big Mac prices, and World Bank national indicators.
What is estimated
Forty-six countries have direct 2026 anchors. The rest are causal projections or peer proxies. Grade A means observed. Grades B through E carry progressively more uncertainty.
What is excluded
International airfare, visas, safety, scarcity, seasonal hotel spikes, and the value of the experience. City rent is a directional accommodation signal, not a nightly hotel estimate.
Cheap can be misleading.
Conflict economies and countries with parallel exchange rates can appear artificially inexpensive in dollars while travelers face shortages, restricted access, or prices unavailable at the modeled rate. Treat grade C, D, and E results as broad bands.
Technical notes and model limits
The visitor model has a 9.1% leave-one-country-out mean absolute percentage error and a log R² of 0.912. Country rank intervals show the modeled 80% range. Neighboring positions are rarely meaningfully different.
Moderate inflation has a confidence interval that crosses zero. Housing supply, taxes, tourism, migration, energy policy, conflict, and informal prices are not fully identified. Big Mac sources also use different collection channels, including in-store, delivery, and secondary data.
Resident affordability is shown only as context in country detail panels. It uses modeled local cost-to-wage ratios and is less precise than the tourist index.