Shanghai the 16th cheapest city for budget travellers?

Inspired by the latest Mercer HR rankings of the world's most expensive cities for expats, Rob Meyer of the GoBudgetTravel blog (a pretty new site apparently) has put together a similar ranking of the least-expensive cities in the world for budget travellers.

The two variables he used in determining the Budget Cost per Day for each of the 94 cities in his study are:

1. The cheapest private, double occupancy room that I could find in each city. (private rooms, as they were the most commonly available accommodation options I found across the board. This does not mean that these are the cheapest of all accommodation options, as a dorm style accommodation is certainly less expensive when available. However, for comparison purposes it made more sense to just look at private rooms.)
2. The price of a cheap local meal in each city, multiplied by 2. Meant to represent the cost of two meals per day.

All expenses were derived from either his personal experiences, information provided by his fellow backpacker friends, HostelBookers.com (accommodation prices), HostelWorld.com (accommodation prices), and the Lonely Planet World Guide (cheap meal prices).

So Shanghai ranked 26th on the expensive list and 16th on the cheap list. Guess it is true how Shanghai can both be expensive or cheap depending on your lifestyle! And here the rankings:

Read the complete post at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/shanghaiist/~3/132069283/shanghai_the_16.php