Daily food budgets for travel, explained

"How much should I budget for food?" is the question travel forums answer worst, because the answers are vibes: "it depends", "we spent €50 a day", "you can do it cheap". Food costs have structure, and once you see the structure the guesswork disappears. Every trip has three possible food budgets, they scale predictably by city, and the only hard part is admitting which one you are.

The three tiers, defined plainly

Budget means the city feeds you the way it feeds itself: supermarket breakfasts, bakery lunches, street food or the set-lunch counter, cooking the occasional dinner if there's a kitchen. It is a real way to travel, and in most of the world it is eating better, not worse. But it is a plan, not an accident.

Mid-range is what most holidays actually look like: coffee out, a casual lunch, dinner at a proper restaurant most nights, a glass of wine with it. When people come home and say "we spent about €X a day on food", X is almost always this tier.

Premium is not "more food", it is a different trip: tasting menus, hotel breakfast, the second bottle. Budget for it only if it is the point of the trip.

What the tiers cost, city by city

This is where hand-waving ends. Our price data tracks all three tiers, per person per day, from published travel-cost data plus live checks, and the spread between cities is enormous. In our December price data, the mid-range tier ran from €31 a day in Bangkok to €84 a day in Rome, with Tokyo (€56), the city with the expensive reputation, sitting below Paris (€72) and barely above Barcelona (€58). At the budget tier the same data puts Bangkok at €12 a day and Rome at €33.

Two conclusions fall straight out of those numbers. First, the city choice moves your food budget more than any amount of menu discipline inside it: a week of mid-range eating costs about €370 in Bangkok and about €590 in Rome for the same traveller. Second, reputation and price have drifted apart. The "cheap" cities of twenty years ago and the cheap cities now are different lists, which is exactly why we publish numbers instead of folklore.

The tier people lie to themselves about

Mid-range is the tier everyone claims and few count honestly, because the leaks are individually invisible: the €4.50 morning coffee that becomes a daily fixture, the "just a snack" at 4 p.m., the second bottle on the terrace that the dinner budget didn't expect. A useful discipline: at the end of the first full day, look at what you actually spent on food and multiply by seven. Whatever you feel about your tier, the arithmetic after day one is the tier you are in. Switching tiers mid-trip is free, since the budget is yours; switching tiers silently is how food becomes the line that breaks the plan.

Two levers that genuinely move the number

Kitchen access. An apartment with a kitchen doesn't just shift you toward the budget tier; it changes the geometry. Breakfast at home plus one meal out lands you between tiers at a cost closer to the lower one, and in market cities (Barcelona is the textbook case in our table; the grocery prices on its page tell the story) the gap between feeding yourself and being fed is wide enough to fund a museum day.

Meal timing. In much of the world, lunch is the discounted sitting: set menus, formule plates, the business-lunch pricing that exists because locals dominate midday. Making lunch the big meal and dinner the light one captures the discount deliberately instead of by accident.

Picking your tier before you go

A word on drinks

Drinks are where the tiers blur, because the same evening can belong to any of them. A bottle of water with lunch is budget; the house wine is mid-range; cocktails before dinner are premium, and at two or three rounds each they can outcost the food. If your evenings matter to the trip, price them as their own line instead of letting them wander through the food budget unnoticed.

Picking your tier before you go

Write one number on the trip plan: tier × days × people. Then hold it against the city's numbers. Ours are on every city guide in this section, with the grocery and café line items below each table so you can calibrate the tiers against what you personally eat. The food line will still surprise you once or twice; it will just surprise you inside a number you chose, which is the entire difference between a budget and a wish.