After having several nightmare experiences with Airbnb, my wife and I thought it would be good to know what it costs for a 5-star luxury hotel as a more reliable alternative to vacation rentals.
By doing this research we’d know our options and whether or not we could afford to stay at the best accommodation in any given destination to which we might be going.
We’ve created this resource to help you plan your next vacation and to show that it is possible to find affordable opulence if you go to the right place!
Our Methodology
To calculate the yearly and high season average price of 5-star hotels in each destination we used TripAdvisor as our primary data source. However, certain hotels and resorts didn’t have prices displayed, so in that case, we went directly to the hotel website.
We selected one weeknight in December, March, June, and September in 2018 and checked prices for the five best “Traveler Ranked” hotels in each destination and then averaged those prices to get the numbers you see in our dataset. By using this approach we were able to get a highly accurate representation of average hotel prices across the globe.
We had to expand the area of several destinations in order to have enough hotels in our dataset. These were mainly islands and small countries regions for example: Bali and Costa Rica. All research for each season was performed at least three months in advance to avoid prices being inflated due to last minute bookings. We ended up with 234 destinations around the world that you can browse in the below table.
