Food, fuel and lodging are the prime movers of daily overlanding costs, and your traveling preferences will impact them. Use the sliders to match your traveling style and vehicle fuel economy, and the forecaster will make predictions based on Unit Prices and PLI . Where the Unit Prices and PLI don't apply smoothly, open a country's drawer to set its prices. Once custom prices are set, the Defaults and PLI no longer affect that country's estimate.
| Country | Days | Miles | Daily composition | $/day | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast total |
For a country you add, fuel starts as a flat placeholder with a nudge to look it up — because price level can't predict it, and the real number is a ten-second search.
Preloaded with data from a real 22-country round-the-world motorcycle ride (Apr 2024 – Jan 2025), so you can see the tool in action before building your own trip. Start blank route clears the table to build from scratch; Reset to RTW2 brings the example back.
It is a structured ballpark. Fuel is near-deterministic (your pump price × miles ÷ mpg). Beds and food follow the Defaults until you pin a real number. The incidentals — local transport, SIMs, sights, the odd tire plug — are what you can't research ahead, so they ride on price level (PLI, US=100).
It can't know the lumpy, personal things: Emergency flights home, an ATM withdrawal spent three borders later, a spur-of-the-moment tour, visa costs, carnet or vehicle shipping. Those are deliberately left out so they don't masquerade as "what a country costs."
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How expensive a country is for everyday things — food, a room, local transport — benchmarked against the US at 100. A country at 50 runs about half US prices; at 150, roughly half again more. The tool scales its lodging, food, and incidental estimates by this number, giving a sensible starting figure for places you've not yet researched in-depth.
Look up a country's PLI (Our World in Data) →| Country | Days | Miles | $/day | Total |
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