Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa and Josh!

Soundtrack for this newsletter: Money - Pink Floyd

Every year, we go back through all the numbers and calculate exactly how much a 1 year trip around the world for 1 person costs - done backpacking style.

And, I gotta tell you, inflation and rising travel costs have not been friendly to us travelers (or anyone, really, for that matter, maybe, except really, really rich people.)

Let’s get into it.

It’s a relatively laborious process doing this, but a fun one. Trip planning in hyperspeed - going back through hundreds of hotel prices, reaching out to campervan companies, tracking flight prices, looking at entry ticket costs, ferry prices, going through restaurant menus, car rental costs, travel insurance prices, visa fees, baggage fees, tour costs, sim cards, train prices, taxi app prices… you get the idea.

The trip in question is what we call the “El Classico.” A 1 year round the worlder for 1 person, done budget backpacking style - definitely nothing fancy, but also not slumming it. A nice mix of hostels and hotels.

Start in LA for no reason other than simplicity, then 1 month in Japan eatin’ sushi, ridin’ bullet trains, campervanning across NZ, same with Australia, up through Bali, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, riding trains allll the way across Vietnam, South Korea, Jordan, Istanbul, bopping all over Europe, London to Mexico, Brazil, throw a cruise in there why not, bingo bango bongo back home exactly 365 days later.

This whole thing goes into our trip planner (which also just got an update with this new trip - you have access to this if you’re joined this newsletter), and we add up all the various obvious costs plus the not-so-obvious ones, and 12 hours later, we get it all down to one number. The actual cost of a 1 year RTW trip.

So - the actual cost for 1 person to travel around the world for 1 year starting in 2024 issss…

$33,969 (nice) - of course it can be done for way cheaper and for much more, but this is a good baseline. This isn’t just theory either, we’ve actually gone to most of these places in the past few years, and have traveled them on this budget (if you’ve watched any of our videos, you know just how budget).

This is up - way, way up from just 2 years ago. We had that number pegged at just over $22,000, which makes this a 54%!!! increase from then. Ouch.

There are tons of reasons why this has happened - travel is more popular than ever, airfare is up 25%, massively outpacing inflation, hotel prices are up worldwide, YouTubers, amirite? 🙂 - basically, everything travel is more in demand, everywhere.

It’s hard to tell if this change is permanent, or just pent up demand from the previous years of COVID lockdown causing people to get their travel on in much higher numbers. All our friends are going on significantly more trips than ever before, and way more people are working from basically anywhere but home. It feels like everyone is going everywhere else, all the time. It’s great! But it’s also…not?

Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that every single big city we’ve gone to has felt INCREDIBLY busy. And, not just busy, but… a bit ruder? It seems that the drastic increase in tourism has had a notably negative effect on the general tenor of the popular tourist locales. I mean, it makes sense—if 1,000 people just came over to your house, unannounced, all because a TikToker told the world you made the best chocolate cake in the area after coming to your neighborhood bake sale, you’d be either 1) running to the nearest grocery store to buy out their baking section, 2) trying to start a cacao farm in a hurry 3) attempting desperately to keep up with demand from angry customers who are waiting impatiently for your cake or 4) trying to sell your home to the highest bidder (or maybe more likely, all of these at the same time.)

It’d be hard to imagine that every one of those thousand unannounced “guests” are the epitome of sunshine, patience, and delight. And yeah, that’s what I imagine it’s like to be working for a small business in the travel industry right now.

Again - anecdotal evidence there - but maybe you’ve been feeling that too?

We’re secretly hoping that this number will calm down a bit when we recalculate next year around this same time, but it honestly is hard to imagine.

If you zoom out even a little bit, what we’re seeing is the most demand for travel in the history of the world, and along with it, likely an even larger increase in ungrateful and brash behavior from those traveling.

I’m sure you’ve witnessed just a few examples of these in the past year—someone who doesn’t respect the queue, an angry tourist demanding their rooms be cleaned or they should get a refund, someone flying their buzzy drone right above the heads of hundreds of other tourists as they struggle to keep their balance climbing up a waterfall, and the near infinite uptick of Karen-ness across the board (no offense to those of you with the name).

The prices will come down. Travel will go back to normal. It’ll just take some time.

In the meantime, I think all we can do is be a little bit kinder, a little bit more patient, a little bit more generous to all the people working hard to make our trips possible.

I mean, thousands of people just showed up unannounced into their house.

Let’s all pitch in and make things a little bit easier on our overworked hosts :)

If you want to check out the updated spreadsheet - it’s here, along with the map to this 2024 RTW trip update.

Have you noticed any of this - travel getting more expensive, hotel prices out of control, restaurants totally full with food prices that are outlandish? Let us know what you’ve seen out there in the big bad world :)

Ok! On to the →

What else are we up to?

We just wrapped up filming the first half of Season 3 - Fuji, Japan Train Voyage, Shanghai, and Iceland. Half of those are out, the other half are coming to a YouTube near you.

We’re back at home now doing post production on the remaining videos, while writing and planning the last 4 videos of Season 3. We haven’t fully decided where we’re going to film those, other than that it’s probably long overdue that we make some videos in Europe.

And, ya know, I hear Christmas Markets are nice there this time of year.

Also, if you missed it, we picked the first winner of our study abroad scholarship! It’s been an amazingly long road to this point, and we’re so, so, so excited to get to meet the winner and hand her a comically large novelty check. That’s happening tomorrow morning, and it couldn’t come soon enough.

This study abroad scholarship has really meant everything to us, and we just want to say thank you to all of you, especially, for helping us get to this point, and the biggest possible thank you to those that went a step beyond and donated to help a college student make their study abroad dreams come true. We have so many feelings about all of this, it’s overwhelming - you’ll see once we get the video out.

We want to give away 1,000 of these scholarships, but we obviously can’t afford to do that quite yet - we are planning on doing another $5,000 one in spring semester, followed by another one for the fall semester.

Our plan from here on out is to take $500 from every brand deal we get and donate that to the study abroad fund, and another $500 from each brand deal will go into a piggy bank that, once it reaches $10,000, we will give that to a member of the Lisa and Josh community and send them on a trip around the world.

Just because we can 🙂

If you want to help, you can donate to our study abroad fund (it’s through a scholarship nonprofit org called Bold, a totally tax deductible donation), or just keep on watching our videos.

That’s it for this week! Next up: our Japan train adventure. It was one of the most fun videos we’ve ever made, can’t wait for you to see it.

Today

Editing, and trying to convince our new robot vacuum not to eat our feet

The (Near) Future

Flying to Europe, releasing more videos, meeting the winner of our scholarship

Our Latest Videos

Sometimes, you just need a big ole bowl of noodles

Up, up, up until you can’t up no more

Please tell us why this video didn’t do well, we had so much fun making it

See you next week…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs 4 years ago, you’ll likely be interested in our Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles course on our Patreon. It’s included with any level. Check it out here.

https://patreon.com/lisaandjosh

Also, here’s a cute cat :)