Ranking
Click a city to zoom the map to its country and pulse its location. Click a country to filter the list. “Details” on the right opens the month-by-month page for that city. The star saves a favourite in this browser only.
By country
The bar spans the annual medians of that country’s cities, from its cheapest to its priciest city on a logarithmic scale; the dot marks the country median. Click a country to open its city list and zoom the map. The star saves a favourite.
About the data
Source, method and limits
- Source: Booking.com search results with the 4-star filter applied. First collected on 21 September 2026; since then each city is re-surveyed in turn roughly once a month (each city page shows its own survey date).
- Method: for every city and date we ran a binary search on the price-cap filter until half of the available hotels fell below the cap. That price is the measured median. The number of listings was recorded at the same time.
- Dates: one night in each of the twelve months following the city’s survey date, alternating between the second Tuesday and the second Saturday so that weekdays and weekends are both covered. The annual figure is the median of those twelve samples.
- Terms: one night for two adults in one room, shown in Japanese yen with taxes and service charges included. Single occupancy or tax-exclusive listings sit at a different level.
- Star ratings: as displayed on Booking.com. What a star means in practice varies by country: a 4-star in Southeast Asia and one in Western Europe differ in facilities and location.
- Why only 4-star: in many cities the 5-star count falls into single digits, so no meaningful median exists, and 3-star quality varies too much between countries. The median city lists 66 four-star hotels, which makes them the best basis for comparison (evidence and limits).
- Cities marked ≈: the count-based search was unstable in five cities (Budapest, Funchal, Mykonos, Phuket and Denpasar), so the median of the prices shown on the first results page was used instead. Those figures tend to run slightly high.
- Thin inventory: where fewer than 30 hotels are listed, a handful of openings or closures moves the median sharply. Those counts are dimmed in the table.
- Seasonality: where the swing exceeds 2×, do not rely on the annual median alone. Check the monthly trend.
- Difference from the Budget Your Trip edition: the earlier version, now removed, used Kayak reference prices, excluded tax and averaged over the year. It came out systematically cheaper, by 1.7× at the median.
- Map: OpenStreetMap contributors / Leaflet. Coordinates from Nominatim.