4 Reasons that currency drops don’t really make vacations cheaper

The rest of the article below mainly deals with cheaper countries with exchange rates that can move around a lot. Costs on the ground can become cheaper or more expensive when going between the biggest economies when exchange rates move.

Countries where exchange rates matter at least a bit

• USA, Canada, UK, Eurozone, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you are going pretty much anywhere else, currency fluctuations don’t really make things cheaper for holidays at all. Here’s why:

Unless you happen to be traveling to a country that neighbors your own, chances are that the airfare there and back will be one of the biggest expenses of your whole trip. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), airline tickets operate within their own mini economy that is mainly based on supply and demand rather than local prices.

Virtually every airline buys or leases its planes in US dollars or euros, and jet fuel is also priced in USDs around the world. The only local expenses are crew salaries and some food, and if a currency drop makes those slightly cheaper for airlines, the airline will typically just use that new profit to try to stay in business rather than cutting fares by a few dollars each.

This might be the most frustrating part. When you see that a country’s currency has declined by, say, 20% or even more, you also discover that almost all hotels actually price their rooms in US dollars or euros anyway. It’s usually only the cheapest 1-star hotels that maintain local prices, partly because most of their guests are locals anyway.

Any hotel that gets a good share of its business from foreigners will set prices in big currencies because it’s mostly about supply and demand anyway. In other words, they set room rates as high as they can in order to fill the most rooms at the highest total rate. They know tourists still have the same amount of their own money, so there is no real pressure to lower room rates.

This is even more true in luxury hotels and international chains, which are generally built with loans and financing based on US dollars. They have to be repaid in dollars, so there’s no way they’d risk losing money if a local currency drops. Generally speaking, the nicer the hotel, the better chance it will set rates based on dollars or euros.

Similar to the hotel situation, tour operators even in developing countries will usually price their products in big currencies. Not only does it prevent them from losing money when their currency goes down and their fuel prices go up, but it’s generally easier for visitors to process that a day tour is US$15 instead of 315,600 Vietnam Dong or 183,450 Indonesian Rupiah.

It’s also a bit shocking and sometimes disappointing to find that most souvenir sellers, even the ones hassling sunbathers along beaches, will price their wares in dollars or euros as well. For one thing, they are all specialists in getting the highest price possible from each buyer, so even if their costs go down a bit, that doesn’t affect the demand at all.

If you want a t-shirt that says “Good Morning Vietnam!” in Hanoi, they are going to ask for US$5 (rather than 105,200 Vietnam Dong), and only after you agree on a price will they convert it into local currency so they can make change.

So even with all the bad news above, you might still assume that local food, and especially street food, will get cheaper through a declining currency. Sometimes it does, but very often those currency losses directly lead to inflation in food and fuel prices. Since petrol is priced around the world in US dollars, it automatically gets more expensive when a local currency drops.

Fuel price hikes also contribute to food price hikes because shipping is so much of the total. For example, the Indian Rupee has declined by over 30% in the last few years against the USD and Euro, but prices for things like rice and onions have gone up even more over the same time. So even street vendors have to raise their local prices when their ingredients go up in price, and local customers have no choice but to go along with it as well.