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BOLBolivia+55.6%KAZKazakhstan−20.5%NGANigeria−16.9%ARGArgentina−15.2%COLColombia−14.4%ZMBZambia−14.3%UGAUganda+14.1%PRYParaguay−11.5%IDNIndonesia+9.6%POLPoland+9.1%LKASri Lanka+8.7%MARMorocco+8.6%KORSouth Korea−8.5%TWNTaiwan+7.8%SWESweden+7.8%TZATanzania+7.7%SENSenegal+6.6%TURTürkiye−6.5%CZECzechia+6.4%PHLPhilippines+6.3%NPLNepal+6.1%DOMDominican Republic−6.0%
Trip Arbitrage
About

I have traveled this way for years. This is the tool I wanted.

My name is Juan Rodriguez. I am an engineer by trade, and I travel in a way most people would call unusual: I lean heavily on points redemptions, and I go where prices have come apart from what a place is actually worth.

That often means going somewhere right after the thing that scared everyone else off. A terrorist attack, an economic collapse, a currency crisis: each one empties hotels and flights and opens a gap between price and value. I have made a habit of walking into that gap.

Why an engineer built a travel site

I have always been interested in arbitrage in the broad sense: labor arbitrage, the comparative advantages of different economies, why the same hour of work or the same meal costs ten times more in one country than another. Travel is the one place an ordinary person can act on those differences directly.

Doing it well used to mean a lot of manual work. You had to watch exchange rates, then check whether inflation had already eaten the move, then weigh that against how safe and how difficult the place really was. I did that by hand for years. Trip Arbitrage does it every morning for 100 countries and 84 cities, so that anyone can do what I have been doing.

What the site does and does not tell you

The index measures the real change in what your money buys, after inflation, and then deliberately marks countries down for danger and for friction. My own appetite for risk is higher than most people’s, and I did not want to build that into a tool other people rely on. A country under a serious advisory cannot rank highly here, however cheap it gets.

If you travel the way I do, the raw numbers are all on each country page and you can draw your own conclusions. If you do not, the rankings are built for you. Either way, read the advisory, and read the method, which sets out the formulas and where they can be wrong.

How it is run

The data refreshes itself daily from public sources. The dispatches are written by an automated system working from that data, and are labeled as such. No destination, tourism board or travel company can pay to change a ranking.