Data
Travel cost data, free to reuse
Three datasets we keep, each answering a question a traveller actually asks: what a meal costs where you are going, what the flight costs, and what the bus costs per kilometre. All of them publish the working — method, sourcing and limits — and all of them come as CSV and JSON. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
The Price of a Plate
Each country's national dish in local currency, US dollars at a single fixed FX date, and — the number that makes it interesting — minutes of average net work needed to pay for it. 56 countries, one dish each, 55 ranked.
35× between the world's cheapest (Koshari in Egypt, $0.88) and the priciest (Rosti / cheese fondue in Switzerland, $30.76).
CSV · JSON · study page
Flight fare index
The cheapest one-way fare we can find on each route we track, with distance, airline, stops and the departure date attached to that fare. 16 of 16 routes carried a live price when we last checked.
Cheapest on the day: London → Barcelona at €32 for 12 Nov 2026.
CSV · JSON · study page · refreshed 20 Sep 2026
Intercity bus fare index
145 intercity bus routes ranked by what the ride costs per 100 km — the only way a 55 km city hop and a 900 km overnight run compare.
The long rides win: on euro routes, an average of €5.50 per 100 km under 300 km against €3.88 above 500 km — distance makes buses cheaper per kilometre.
CSV · JSON · study page
How to cite
Take the numbers, quote them, chart them. A mention of the source and a link is all we ask — and if your data desk wants the raw file, the CSV and JSON links above are direct, no login and no rate limit.
- WhatWhereVacay. (2026). The Price of a Plate: What the National Dish Costs in 56 Countries [Data set]. https://whatwherevacay.com/data/plate-cost-2026
- WhatWhereVacay. (2026). Flight Fare Index 2026 [Data set]. https://whatwherevacay.com/data/flight-fares-2026
- WhatWhereVacay. (2026). Intercity Bus Fare Index 2026 [Data set]. https://whatwherevacay.com/data/bus-fares-2026
What we do not do
- We never convert one currency into another to build a single ranking. Where a dataset holds several currencies, the rankings stay inside them, because anything else means inventing an exchange rate.
- We label provenance per row rather than implying every figure is measured. In the plate index, rows state whether the price was published for that specific dish, borrowed from a country-average proxy, or estimated.
- We separate live prices from editorial starting fares, and say which is which on every page.
- Every headline number on these pages is derived from the data by code that routes through the same public files you can download.