Travel: Going the Expensive Way

The businessman who travels or is as signed abroad these days will likely be dismayed to discover that it costs more to visit or live in a foreign city than ever before. Such is the verdict of the annual survey of 23 cities around the world conducted by London’s staid Financial Times. The Times reports that the basic cost of food, clothing, lodging and entertaining has gone up almost everywhere—and suggests a few dos and don’ts for the savvy.

In the past year, the overall cost-of-living index has risen a jarring 35% in Buenos Aires, 10% in Rome, 6% in Stockholm, 5% in Lisbon and Istanbul. Stockholm now leads all other cities in the cost of food, followed by Tokyo, Oslo, Helsinki, Paris and Rome; New York ranks all the way down to seventh on the list. Hotel rates are highest in Paris and Mexico City ($26 a day for a single), but a stay at the best hotels in Johannesburg and Lisbon costs only $7 a night.

The businessman who wants to entertain can do best in Buenos Aires, where a night out for four (with dinner, theater and a nightclub windup with champagne) costs only $34. For the same kind of fun in Tokyo, where a geisha costs $27 per evening, a spender can run up a staggering $250 bill without really trying. New York does not run much less. The best place to rent a comfortable apartment is in The Hague, Lisbon. Montreal or Oslo, where such accommodations can be had for less than $120 per month. In Tokyo, however, a three-room furnished apartment rents for $560, in Mexico

City for $400, in New York for $365 The growing cost of such miscellaneous items as cabs, phones and tips also empties the businessman’s pockets. Taxi fares have risen 12% in Helsinki over the past year, about 8% in New York. Tax hikes have raised the price of a bottle of Scotch in Helsinki by 5% to a sobering $11 a fifth. In Helsinki, one British businessman complained to the Financial Times, eating out is “costing $84 a year in tips to cloakroom attendants for bowler hat and umbrella.”