Good countries that are top value

WHICH COUNTRIES ARE good to travel in and also offer value for money? We all like a bargain. The Top 100 Countries index gives us a good guide.

One of the key criteria in the index is value for money. This is based on the Purchasing Price Parity index from the World Bank, which measures how much you can buy for your money in each country.

The PPP index uses the USA as a base, equal to 1.00. Above that level, things cost more than they do in the USA and below that level they cost less. By using our standard ‘stretching’ method, we have converted all these PPP numbers into a rating from 0 to 100, so all components of the index use the same scale.

Unfortunately, the countries that rate highest on the Top 100 Countries index tend to be the most expensive. All but one of the countries in the Top 20 overall are outside the top 100 when it comes to value for money. The sole exception is the Czech Republic, which is 20^th overall and comes in 98^th for value for money.

We all like value when we travel, so I thought I’d do some analysis by comparing every country’s overall rating with their value for money rating. I did this by simply adding the two indexes together. The higher the number the better, as a combination of overall desirability and value for money.

The results were very interesting, and show how useful the Top 100 Countries index can be. Using this analysis the country with the most reasons for visiting combined with the best value for money is Turkey. This makes perfect sense - just about anybody who has ever been there loves the place and says how cheap it is. It is the 51^st best country overall and the 17^th cheapest.

Some of the other countries are less obvious. Second is Turkey’s neighbour Bulgaria, with nearby Romania coming 6^th. These two countries have become quite popular since they joined the European Union, especially with Russians and Germans. More people from the Anglosphere should go there.

Use the interactive table at the bottom of this blog to see where each countries ranks.

Other Eastern Europe countries that do well are Belarus (4^th) and Poland (11^th). It’s just six hours by train from Minsk to Warsaw, and your zloty and ruble will go a long way.

I was pleased to see Malaysia (3^rd) and Thailand (9^th) in the Top Ten. These are great countries to visit and really good value for money. They are two of my favourites. I’m less sure about Tunisia (5^th) and Mongolia (8^th), which are cheap without being great destinations.

The other country in the Top Ten is Kazakhstan, which Borat put on the map for most people. I haven’t been there but I’ve spoken to people who have and they loved it. Very big country with lots to see – the great outdoors and some fabulous architecture. And cheap.

Many of us like to go to Europe. The further east and further south you get the cheaper things are, but what of the major destinations? The number one country in the entire Top 100 is Spain. One of the reasons it is in that position is because it is the cheapest of the major European destinations. It comes in at 28^th on our comparison, way ahead of the other countries that make up the ‘Big Five’ of Western Europe: Italy (75^th), Germany (89^th), France (93^rd) and the UK (106^th).

Okay, so this is not a perfect analysis. But it does give us some insight. You can do a similar thing with any of the indexes in the Top 100 Countries, comparing things like Safety and Health, or Environment and Happiness.

I’m working on a system that enables anybody to enter a different weighting for each of the ten factors in the index so you can do any sort of analysis based on what is important to you. That will make the index much more useful. If Safety is important to you, you can weight it so it’s more important than, say, Popularity.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions?