I travel — a lot. I’m by no means wealthy; in fact, I would say I make a pretty modest living. A lot of the ways I am able to travel so much are because of my work as a travel writer, and also because I do a lot of creative travel (home exchanges, etc) and travel hacking (awards travel, etc).
But I also think carefully about the places I visit, and how affordable they are. That’s why I’ve spent so much time traveling in South Asia and Central America. Yes, of course, I’ve explored expensive places like Scandinavia, and am currently planning a trip to Australia (and really watch my budget when I travel places like this that suck down the bucks!) But so many wonderful places in the world are so affordable, offering a wonderful lifestyle at a good cost of living. Sometimes it doesn’t even pay me to stay home!
That’s why I was excited to see that Insider teamed up with one of my favorite and most go-to travel search engines, Kayak, to come up with a list of the cheapest places to visit this year. They pegged the most affordable destination of the year as Guadalajara, Mexico. I’ve never been to Guadalajara, but I’ve traveled a lot throughout Mexico and love it so much. In fact, it’s a country I would seriously look at moving to, and many of the places I’ve been in Mexico are very affordable. So Guadalajara? Yep, just went on my list.
Other places to top the list include:
- Calgary, Canada
- Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Tampa, Florida
- Baltimore, Maryland
Of Kayak’s 100 most-searched flight destinations, the below 10 are the destinations with the lowest overall median trip cost — a number that was calculated based on the price of a flight and a three-night hotel stay. The travel dates and search dates that Kayak looked at fell within the one-year period of October 25th, 2016, to October 24th, 2017.
Kayak also provided median hotel prices in those destinations and median airfare prices for flights departing from the US and Canada to those cities. All of these prices are based on travel dates that fall within the one-year period of November 1st, 2016, and October 31st, 2017.
You can check out the full list for yourself here.
