Are you planning an amazing meeting in Madrid, a conference in Kathmandu, or an incentive in Idaho? Maybe you are just travelling to Cincinnati, Chicago, or San Francisco… Maybe you got that hot new job offer to plan meetings for that kick-ass association in Washington, DC. The reason does not matter because if you are an event planner headed somewhere new, you must know what crap is going to cost because crap adds up.
We all know that you can find the cost of living for far flung places a number of ways. You can go-a-Googling. You can call up that nice lady at the local CVB, you know, the one that never calls you back. You can consult the stars. You can even call your local wizard and he can whip up a budgeting potion for you. While these things may or may not work, you could just head over to Numbeo and type in the city name and BAM… information at your finger tips.
According to Numbeo, they are:
Numbeo is the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. Numbeo provides current and timely information on world living conditions including cost of living, housing indicators, health care, traffic, crime and pollution.
To say it in simple terms, by using Numbeo, you can find out the average cost of stuff ranging from restaurant meals and taxi rides to hotel stays and apartment rentals. You can also see the odds of getting whacked in the head by a mugger and how much the post-whack emergency room visit is going to cost you… and you can do it for hundreds of cities across the globe. Hundreds.
Here is a look at Chicago:
Now this is just a screenshot of the top of the page. You can dig a whole lot deeper. You can dive right into the rabbit hole and spend a good amount of time digging.
Just think of the uses for this type of data.
You can now calculate the real cost of attending your event, what to budget for staff per diems (if you are a nice person), or you can simply plot your next vacation.
