The San Francisco Bay Area, popularly referred to as the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. When you travel to a poor country, figure you'll have to stay in international-standard hotels and eat in international-standard restaurants - often at higher cost than traveling down-market in an expensive country. Even in an expensive country, you can usually keep costs under control by traveling a bit down-market - no big problem in the developed world. One easy way is to minimize your time in the biggest cities and instead spend time in the countryside or smaller communities. Still, when you have a choice, it's a good idea to avoid the really expensive cities. Don't choose a destination strictly for low costs - you're apt to wind up somewhere you really don't want to be.
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Sadly, you find a huge gulf in price and quality between international-standard accommodations and restaurants on the one hand, and the accommodations and restaurants where average locals go. On the other hand, most of us would probably shy away from comparably priced accommodations and restaurants in most of the less developed world. I'm sure we'd feel OK in similar budget accommodations and restaurants in mega-expensive Oslo. And we're happy to eat in a corner bistro. American visitors would not feel insecure or uneasy in one of them. Although France's bottom-budget motels such as Formule 1 make Motel 6s look like palaces, for example, they aren't grubby. In highly developed Western countries, American travelers can feel comfortable moving fairly well down the scale of hotel accommodations and restaurants. In China, for example, the difference is heavily influenced by China's deliberate undervaluation of the yuan - a big contributor to China's export boom.Ĭurrency-based cost comparisons don't tell the whole story for tourists. costs with costs in other countries: You don't know how much of the difference is due to differences in standards of living and how much is due to over- or under-valued currencies. Those rankings illustrate a problem with any figures that compare U.S.