Marcus Webb
Slow travel. There’s been a lot of hype about the concept lately. Some present it as a new lifestyle, but I believe it can also be explained and even calculated. In the end, staying longer in fewer places can become cheaper than constantly switching between destinations – but only under certain conditions. Here are the three curves to determine when slow travel is more cost-efficient and when it’s not.
Curve one: accommodation discounts at longer stays
Prices for accommodations, like hotels, guesthouses, and apartment rentals, often decrease at longer stays. Here is a graph for a few examples, which I gathered while researching prices for destinations that I am considering for my travels:
Hostels: Between 10% to 25% price reduction for 1 week stay (i.e. 7 nights), and up to 30% to 45% (i.e. 30 nights) for 1 month stay. Note: Some hostels have strict maximum length of stay policies (up to 2 weeks). Some hostels actually prefer long stays and should be negotiated with directly. Budget guesthouses: Their nightly rate will fall by 15 to 30% for a week long stay and by as much as 40 to 50% for a month or more. Again, direct-to-owner booking can offer lower rates than booking through platforms. Apartment rentals on the other hand do have automated long stay discounts. Typically 10% off the nightly rate for each week long and then a large discount of 25% to 40% for each month long. Again these rates are found via search function on rental websites. Direct to owner apartments and houses can save 50% below normal long term stay rates. Hotels however are not really suited to long stays and generally don’t offer any special discounts unless you negotiate them for yourself. In a previous article I have already written about how hotels work and they are usually optimized for fast turnarounds, so long stays are generally not a good idea.
In summary, as long as you book accommodation that falls in one of the first three categories, you will save money by traveling slowly. Hotels, on the other hand, do not typically offer discounts for long stays and thus are best booked for short periods of time.
Curve two: food costs at longer stays
Food costs decrease the longer you stay in a place, for several converging reasons: Test it.
You find the local store where to buy fresh groceries and cook some of your meals there. Once you’ve found the best spots (not always listed in your travel guide), it makes a big difference over longer periods of time as well. You stop ordering “tourist food” and start finding restaurants and places to eat that locals frequent but which are not written up in tourist guidebooks. For a significant portion of these, their menus will be 30-50% lower in price than equivalent offerings of restaurants which cater to tourists. You buy more (e.g. a 1kg pack of rice instead of 100g packs) to reduce your unit cost of products.
This change in food costs becomes even more apparent as you reach the end of your stay in a city. I have tracked daily costs of food for many stays around the world, and found that the costs of food for a stay of 4 weeks in a city to be only 60-70% of the costs of food for a stay of 1 week in that same city. This represents a very large portion of your overall budget for travel.
Curve three: transit and incidentals
Now to your third chart that goes in the wrong direction. I am sure most readers already know the plot. Airport to city transit costs decrease dramatically with duration of stay. In addition to an initial airport-to-city charge, test also the cost of trains or long distance bus to alternate cities. The most that articles ever discuss are initial airport-to-city transfers that are typically charged once (or twice if different carriers for each leg). However, as you correctly note, there is also a charge to transfer to another city, by train or long distance bus. I found that in the few examples where I found sufficient information online to be believable, the airport to city transfer was by far the greatest share of such transfers. So, I rarely include the others into my tests. Your example fits within that scope I normally set for such online research. A 200-dollar flight plus a 20-dollar airport-to-city transfer (e.g. for a bus that goes from airport to your city’s main train station): The amortized cost of arrival per day decreases sharply as duration of stay increases dramatically:
200-dollar air fare plus 20-dollar airport-to-city transfer (as tested in articles):
Over 3 days: 73 dollars per day in transit. Over 7 days: 31 dollars per day. Over 14 days: 16 dollars per day. Over 30 days: 7 dollars per day.
And, by itself, this graph shows that for travel to the same destination, 30 days of travel will be significantly cheaper than 3 days of travel.
Where slow travel doesn’t work
The other case where slow travel fails.
If your base fare for a destination such as Tokyo, Reykjavik or central London is high and does not in itself go down very much with slow travel, then the additional savings of the food and accommodations along the way will not sum to enough to make it cost effective to travel slowly in that place. When your total trip duration is fixed for visiting multiple destinations. In this case, a long stay in a single destination means exactly that – a long stay in a single destination. Even when a traveler has a tourist visa that allows for a stay of 30 to 60 days in a foreign country, slow travel still will not work if they plan to visit a number of different destinations while abroad. You don’t have income to spend while traveling, so although long stays may become cheap in terms of daily cost, they will soon exhaust your funds.
Where slow travel shines
Slow travel works best when:
Most important, you’re traveling to a place that’s of reasonable price level (to a Slow Traveler like me, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and some countries of Eastern Europe like Poland and Hungary qualify; to others, parts of Western Europe might). You rent a small apartment for the month. Flexibility regarding your travel dates (approx. one month). You are more interested in in-depth exploration of a few locations rather than a variety of different destinations. You work remotely and have extra money coming in to your bank account during your time abroad.
The compound effect across categories
The three graphs above are not independent. They are combined into the following graphic which highlights the huge savings for a slow traveler staying in a low-cost-of-living destination for a long period of time.
Accommodation cost: 40 percent below short-stay rate. Food cost: 35 percent below first-week rate. Transit cost: 80 percent below short-stay-amortized rate.
The compound effect of slow travel can be substantial and is the reason it “works.” A number of weeks in a few different destinations, as opposed to days in many, is likely to be a far more cost effective way of traveling than moving from place to place in a hurry. In fact the difference could be as much as 45% to 60% less per day than traveling in the typical fast fashion manner and exploring many locations in brief.
The example numbers
A real example: daily expenditure from my own itineraries in Lisbon in 2025.
3-4 days in Lisbon in 2025, total $880, per day $293, a Hostel Dorm, eating in restaurants, all travel, 1 museum (which we ended up not entering because it was too crowded) 30-yr-old traveler: 2,640 dollars for 30 days in Lisbon (2,640 / 30 = 88 dollars per day) for a small studio, home-cooked meals, public transportation and 3 museums plus 1 cooking class.
Same city, same kind of experience, very different per-day economics. The 30-day stay also produced a fundamentally richer engagement with the place: friends, repeat visits to favorite cafes, neighborhood understanding, a sense of being in Lisbon rather than visiting it.
The practical advice
If you travel in order to see many places, than slow travel is not for you. Then you have to pay for the high daily rate of expensive tourist destinations.
It doesn’t work for people who want to see lots of different places, and instead they will pay a premium for a short stay in a destination. For people who want to live in fewer destinations and have a really deep experience of them, slow travel is the answer and it works really well for them. Generally, one week is the minimum length of stay where you start to see the curves compound in meaningful ways. Two to four weeks is generally the sweet spot in most destinations. After two months, the curves start to flatten out, and you don’t get as much value from your time in a destination for every additional month that you stay.
Choose your locations wisely and rent a room/apartment directly from the owner to save on commission costs. Cook some of your own meals. And locate your favorite restaurant/cafe that the locals use and you’ll save a bundle too. All of these things will happen anyway as you travel slowly through locations and experience all that they have to offer in great depth.
