the slow extinction of budget travel
when did backpacking get so expensive?
I took my first backpacking trip in 2016.
Coming from the (cheap) Czech Republic to the (expensive) New Zealand on a student budget, I didn’t have many options but to penny-pinch. Traveling lowcost wasn’t an aesthetic to aspire to; it wasn’t even a choice, really. It was simply the only way I could have made the trip happen.
Not to feed into 2016 nostalgia, but in hindsight, I wonder if I caught the end of a very specific era during my backpacking beginnings. The golden age of budget travel, if you will. A time when backpacking was no longer something reserved for the hippiest of hippies and not quite yet the ‘mandatory’ thing to do after graduation. When lowcost flights and accommodation were actually cheap, and travel communities were large enough to be well organized but still too niche to be profitable.
A time that doesn’t feel all that different from today, precisely because the changes that happened were so subtle and deliberate.
Fast forward to 2026. More people are traveling now than at any point in history, which should mean that travel has become more affordable overall, right?
Not necessarily. Upon closer inspection, the opposite seems to be true.
no such thing as a cheap flight
I remember the peak of cheap flights and Jet2 holidays. Chasing deals, discounts and error fares was almost a sport for us broke university students longing to get out there and see the world. Personally, I never snatched a true superdeal, but I did fly from Prague to London and back for 20 euros, for example.
If that doesn’t seem very different from today’s fares to you, let me add that these were direct flights and included in the price was at least a carry-on bag and some human decency.
Budget airlines are now happier than ever to make you pay for everything beyond the absolute bare minimum (not to mention the superhuman skill required to navigate through the user interface without accidentally buying some bullshit add-on you didn’t want). They aren’t really lowcost anymore, they’re slightly cheaper than regular carriers and come with a side of dehumanization.
And what’s worse, we let it happen—complain about your flight experience, Ryanair will repost it with a sassy comment, and people will laugh about it on the internet. That’s what you get for being broke and flying Ryanair, silly!
the evolution of budget accommodation
Besides lowcost airlines, Airbnb is probably the second most famous case of price expansion and simultaneous enshittification. A platform formerly beloved for offering a more affordable and low-key alternative to hotels is now not only a villain responsible for gentrification and displacement, but also just as expensive as the thing it was supposed to replace. Plus, the service you get for the price is, well, inferior.
With costs converging to hotel levels, the “sleeping in a local’s spare bedroom” aspect long gone, and light being shed on how the platform helps destroy cities, Airbnb now has very little of its original appeal left. Let me get this straight—I have to pay cleaning fees AND also clean the apartment myself before checking out because I’m staying in “someone’s home”? And the “host” who supposedly lives there just so happens to run five near-identical listings all around the city? Give me a break. I’d rather be somewhere with room service at this point.
Airbnb is, however, only one of the many things that have gone from cheap to luxury over the recent years…
what happened to hostels?
Hostels used to be the no-brainer accommodation choice for budget travelers and backpackers because they were all they could afford. That was kind of the whole point—you pay the lowest possible price for a shitty bunk bed and pray it won’t be too gross.
But something has shifted. Hostels all around the world are becoming increasingly nicer, more polished, remote work friendly and running organized events like yoga classes, high-production parties or family dinners to the point they’re sometimes more reminiscent of an adult summer camp than a hostel. All of a sudden, the appeal isn’t just a cheap bed to crash at; hostels now curate a vibe and sell an experience.
Which would be amazing if the beds were still cheap.
The current-day backpacker is happy to pay extra for staying at an instagrammable place with built-in social activities. And nothing wrong with that—there is a use case for a curated digital nomad yoga retreat, as well as the old-fashioned backpacker hostel. It’s just that in many popular destinations, the lines between the two are intentionally being blurred in a way that the former is slowly replacing the latter, decimating the number of options for those who need a truly affordable place to sleep.
dual pricing and nature behind paywall
As overtourism becomes a real threat in many parts of the world, destinations are vehemently trying to come up with ways to mitigate the impact and squeeze out some extra profit at the same time. That’s how we’re starting to see more and more dual pricing systems for attractions as well as new entry fees for formerly free-to-access natural and historical sites.
Madeira has recently resorted to a paid reservation system for its most popular hikes due to overcrowding and conservation concerns. Over in Rome, throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain now costs €2, and several European islands are introducing taxes for simply being there.
These measures are arguably not bad and might even be a necessary component in the ongoing battle against mass tourism takeover. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that the pool of free activities one can enjoy while traveling on a tight budget is shrinking by the day.
death of the alternative
For adventurous souls who can’t afford even the least expensive transportation or lodging, there have always been plenty of more unconventional alternatives. Hitchhiking, ridesharing, couchsurfing, volunteering, house and pet sitting, home swaps. The craftiest hippies have always found a way of doing things differently while saving a few bucks. Still, I can’t help but notice how even these formerly punk travel styles are being slowly rebranded and commodified.
Couchsurfing app, once an amazing resource for making connections on a budget, is now a paid service for both surfers and hosts. Yearly membership fees for volunteering platforms are steadily rising, and, in some twisted dystopian fashion, Worldpackers has started offering “opportunities” where volunteers must pay their hosts in addition to working.
Another example of a community-oriented service platformized and monetized is BlaBlaCar, Europe’s favourite long-distance carpooling service. Once a straightforward trust-based tool that connected drivers with passengers and let them negotiate the price themselves has undergone an Uber-style makeover. Ride costs on the platform are now driven by algorithms, with BlaBla charging passengers up to 30% service fee, making it cheaper to just catch a train.
Not all is doomed though. For every app fallen victim to corporate greed, a Facebook or a Discord channel is out there doing the same thing for free, connecting travelers and keeping the community spirit alive. Various alternatives to the Couchsurfing app, like beWelcome, have emerged, as well as more niche communities such as Host a Sister. Similarly, ridesharing has now moved back to where it first originated, dedicated route-specific groups and channels.
While these projects are operating on a way smaller scale than, say, Couchsurfing or BlaBlaCar in their prime, they are organic, community-driven, and most importantly, still accessible to everyone.
For most of modern tourism history, backpackers and budget travelers were never particularly welcome. They were seen as the wrong kind of visitor—too young, too loud, too poor. Worried they didn’t spend enough money and took up space without contributing meaningfully to the local economy, destinations were never shy of discouraging these “undesirable” travelers from visiting.
And to be fair, the jury is still out on that issue. Some studies suggest that backpackers staying longer and distributing their money more locally results in poverty alleviation and less economic leakage. Other studies found that not the case and instead describe the economic impact of backpackers as following patterns similar to traditional tourism.
To this day, the debate doesn’t seem to be settled, at least not in a way supported by enough conclusive research. There’s also a notable absence of any relevant studies carried out post-pandemic.
What is clear, though, is that the narrative has shifted. Backpackers are increasingly not treated as an inconvenience to be tolerated but as a demographic to be catered to. Backpacking itself has then been transformed from something you did because you couldn’t afford anything else to an identity to embody.
Backpacking is now defined by an aesthetic rather than a budget. The ideals of lowcost travel remain alive and well in marketing strategies while slowly getting sanitized to extinction in real life, making the lifestyle unaffordable to the youths who pioneered it. The barrier to entry has been raised, only letting in those who can afford to perform the culture rather than rely on it.
So, are we witnessing a slow death of budget and alternative travel in 4K?
Perhaps, at least as we know it. It’s hard to say what the future of travel looks like for those who can’t afford to pay premium dressed up as grassroots. Maybe it will live on in niche online groups and communities. Maybe it’s going completely analog, fully embracing the original hippie spirit. Maybe new products will emerge to replace those that lost touch with their original target audiences. Hopefully, the backpackers of the future are a bit more concerned with the impact they have on their destinations and do their part in supporting the people who live there.
In any case, budget travel may be forced back to its margins before it can become accessible again.
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fialka
So insightful. I've already left a response to Hamish's comment on your note re: the difference in backpacking then and now with socialising in hostels and whatnot.
I did most of my backpacking between the late 90s and early 2010s and it really was a different era. I don't think I could hack it now.
Last summer I was working at a school and I had a couple of 20 year old colleagues from Ireland and one of them asked me: "Hey old man, how did you use to travel when you were our age?" (only joking about the 'old man' part, she didn't say that). She was genuinely curious, not taking the piss and so I told them a few tales and they were shocked - the idea of using guidebooks, not booking things ahead of time, no Google maps, TripAdvisor, etc was alien to them.
I had some wonderful couchsurfing/hospitality club experiences as well, met some fascinating people and I just don't think it's the same anymore. The romantic days are over.
This is something I've been meaning to put together in a longer post one of these days - I might come back and ask a few more questions if you're interested in a collaborative and/or guest post type of thing? (was also going to ask Georgia for something similar - an across-the-generations sharing of experiences, perhaps)
Airlines are ridiculous. I have to pay $40 to pick my seat now? I'd rather pay seat roulette and leave it up to the gods.
A private room in a hostel in many of the cities I've looked at (secondary cities in LatAm) are usually more expensive than a night in an Airbnb. There definitely are still cheap buy a bed hostels, like one in Bogota I stayed in for $3/night in Zona G just to see what it was like (actually not bad), but it certainly is harder to find deals.
These days I prefer quiet nights and a full kitchen with month or longer stays, so hostels and hotels don't work. I've never found hotels to be a good value. Airbnbs have their place, but should be more regulated especially in popular tourist markets.