United States travel tips

Budget travel in United States

What a visitor's money does in United States: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.

Expensive average across 41 guides · 5 is very cheap

Money

US Dollar (USD) · 1 USD = 0.87 EUR · 1 USD = 0.75 GBP

US dollar is the currency. Exchange at your home bank before traveling for best rates. Avoid airport and Times Square exchange offices.

ATMs

Avoid: independent ATMs in bars, delis, clubs and hotel lobbies

Use: Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo

Corner-shop machines charge $5-10 on top of your own bank's fee. Many stores also offer cashback on a debit purchase, which avoids the fee entirely.

Getting around

A short ride in New York: $12–25 across town — pricey

From the airport: JFK to Manhattan $70–95 by app, against a flat $70 yellow-cab fare plus tolls

In most American cities there is effectively no taxi trade left to compare with.

City by city, cheapest first

Bryce Canyon Mid-range

One lodge dining room inside, a few places in Bryce Canyon City, and not much else. Stock up in Panguitch or bring it.

Joshua Tree Mid-range

Nothing in the park — no food, no petrol, one water tap at a couple of places. Joshua Tree village and Twentynine Palms have the restaurants, and Pioneertown’s Pappy & Harriet’s is worth the drive.

New Orleans Mid-range

The reason to come. Gumbo, jambalaya, po-boys, crawfish in spring and oysters in months with an R. Eat at Cochon or Willie Mae’s rather than the tourist rooms on Bourbon, get beignets at Café du Monde at 3am when there is no queue, and drink a Sazerac where a bartender makes it properly.

Zion Mid-range

Springdale, at the gate, has everything and charges for the location. There is one place inside the park. Buy food in Hurricane or St George on the way.

Moab Mid-range

A brewery, a few good places on Main Street, and the rest is what a town of five thousand with two million visitors can manage. Book dinner in season.

Death Valley Mid-range

Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells have the only food in the park and it is expensive. Buy everything in Pahrump or Beatty.

Glacier National Park Mid-range

The lodges have dining rooms and there is little else. Whitefish and Kalispell are the towns; buy what you need there.

Austin Mid-range

Barbecue is the reason: brisket by the pound, eaten off butcher paper, and the queue at the famous places starts before they open. Breakfast tacos are the other institution, and the Tex-Mex is the real thing rather than the export version.

Portland Mid-range

Food carts are the institution — whole car parks of them, and better than the restaurants they undercut. Voodoo and Blue Star for doughnuts, coffee taken seriously everywhere, and the best beer selection in America.

Philadelphia Mid-range

The cheesesteak argument — Pat’s, Geno’s, and the places locals name instead; roast pork with broccoli rabe, which is the better sandwich; Reading Terminal Market for everything; and the Italian Market in South Philly.

Savannah Mid-range

Southern and unapologetic: shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, she-crab soup, and Mrs Wilkes’ boarding-house lunch if you will queue. The Grey, in an old bus station, is the restaurant people fly in for.

Santa Fe Mid-range

Green chile on everything, and the only question anyone asks is red or green — say Christmas and get both. Sopaipillas, posole, and the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. The restaurant scene is far better than a town of 80,000 should have.

Las Vegas Expensive

The buffet is not what it was and the good eating is now the chef restaurants and, better, the strip malls off the Strip: Chinatown on Spring Mountain Road has the best food in the city by a distance, and costs a quarter of what the casinos charge. Free drinks while you gamble are still real, and the tip is a dollar a drink.

Yosemite Expensive

The park food is park food. Curry Village and the Ahwahnee dining room are the two ends of it; the village store sells what a picnic needs. Eat in El Portal or Mariposa on the way in.

Nashville Expensive

Hot chicken, which is a specific thing invented here and is genuinely painful at the top heat — start at medium. Meat-and-three, which is a plate at a cafeteria and is the real local lunch. And biscuits, which are not what a British visitor expects.

Hawaiʻi Island (the Big Island) Expensive

Kona coffee at the farms it comes from; poke, plate lunch and loco moco; malasadas; and the Saturday farmers’ market in Hilo, which is where the island shops.

Washington, DC Expensive

Half-smokes at Ben’s Chili Bowl; Ethiopian on Ninth Street, which is the best outside Addis; the Maine Avenue fish market, the oldest in the country; and a restaurant scene in Shaw and Union Market that has arrived.

San Diego Expensive

Fish tacos, which crossed the border and stayed; California burritos, with the chips inside; Little Italy’s Saturday market; and the best craft beer scene in the country, in North Park and Miramar.

Charleston Expensive

The reason a lot of people come: shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, whole hog barbecue, and Gullah cooking that predates all of it. Husk, FIG and Rodney Scott’s are the names; the Sunday brunch culture is serious.

Sedona Expensive

A good small restaurant scene for a town of ten thousand, priced for the visitors. Elote Cafe is the name people queue for. Buy groceries in West Sedona rather than in Uptown.

Grand Teton Expensive

Jackson has the restaurants and the prices of a ski town; Dornan’s in the park does pizza with the best view in Wyoming. Buy groceries in Jackson.

Lake Tahoe Expensive

Ski-town and lake-town food, with a few good places at each end. South Lake has the casinos and the buffets; Truckee and Tahoe City have the restaurants people drive to.

Palm Springs Expensive

Date shakes, which are a valley institution; a good restaurant row on Palm Canyon Drive; and the Thursday night VillageFest street market. Nothing here is cheap in season.

Grand Canyon Expensive

Park food is captive-audience food. El Tovar dining room is the exception and needs booking well ahead. Otherwise bring your own — there are picnic areas with the best views in the country.

Denali Expensive

There is no food in the park worth planning around — pack lunches from Anchorage or the Healy grocery. The canyon strip outside the entrance has a handful of decent places for a season that lasts from June to mid-September, and everything closes the moment it ends.

Yellowstone Expensive

Park food is park food and there is no way around it. The lodges do a decent dinner if you book weeks ahead. The better plan is a cool box: the gateway towns have supermarkets and there is nowhere better to eat a sandwich than a pull-out in the Lamar Valley at seven in the morning.

Los Angeles Expensive

LA’s best food is not fine dining — it is tacos from a truck, Korean barbecue in Koreatown, and Thai food in Thai Town. Grand Central Market downtown is a good single-stop introduction.

Miami Expensive

Little Havana for Cuban food — a cortadito and a medianoche sandwich for a few dollars. Ocean Drive restaurants are tourist traps with mandatory service charges; walk two blocks inland instead.

Anchorage Expensive

King crab, halibut and salmon, and reindeer sausage from a cart outside the 4th Avenue market — which sounds like a gimmick and is genuinely good. The city has a better restaurant scene than its size suggests, because everyone who works in the bush eats here on the way through.

Chicago Expensive

Deep dish is a tourist food and Chicagoans will tell you so; the local pizza is thin and cut in squares. What to eat instead: an Italian beef, dipped, with giardiniera. A Chicago dog, and never with ketchup. And the city has one of the best restaurant scenes in America once you leave the Loop.

Seattle Expensive

Salmon, Dungeness crab and oysters, which are the point of being here. Pike Place is for looking rather than eating — Ballard and Capitol Hill are where the good restaurants are. And the original Starbucks has a forty-minute queue for coffee that is the same as every other Starbucks.

Maui Expensive

Poke by the pound from a supermarket counter, which is how the island eats it; plate lunch — two scoops of rice, macaroni salad and something grilled; malasadas from a bakery in the morning; and the food trucks in Pāʻia and on the Hana road.

Kauaʻi Expensive

Plate lunch and poke, as everywhere in Hawaiʻi; shave ice in Hanalei; and the Kauaʻi Community Market on Saturdays. The north shore is expensive and thin on options — buy in Līhuʻe.

Key West Expensive

Key lime pie, conch fritters, and the shrimp; Cuban sandwiches and café con leche, which is the island’s other half. Eat away from Duval Street and the price halves.

Big Sur Expensive

A handful of restaurants along ninety miles, all expensive, some very good. Nepenthe for the view, Big Sur Bakery for the rest. There is no supermarket; bring what you need.

Juneau Very expensive

Halibut, salmon, spot prawns and Dungeness crab, at their best from a place that buys off the boats rather than one on the dock aimed at the two-hour visitor. The Alaskan Brewing Company is here and is better than the souvenir cans suggest.

Oahu Very expensive

Poke from a supermarket counter, not a restaurant — Foodland does it better than most sit-down places for a third of the price. Plate lunch, malasadas, shave ice with azuki beans at the bottom, and garlic shrimp from a truck on the North Shore.

Boston Very expensive

Clam chowder, lobster roll (cold with mayonnaise here, warm with butter in Maine, and people have opinions), and oysters from Wellfleet. The North End is Italian and the queue outside Mike's Pastry is for cannoli, though Modern Pastry across the street is the local answer.

Napa Valley Very expensive

One of the densest concentrations of serious restaurants in the country — the French Laundry is the famous one and needs booking the moment the calendar opens. The Oxbow Public Market in Napa is the version that does not.

New York Very expensive

Dollar pizza slices are a NYC staple. Skip chains. Every neighborhood has incredible food — Chinatown, Little Italy, Jackson Heights (Queens) for Indian.

San Francisco Very expensive

The Mission for burritos and Chinatown for dim sum are the two things everyone gets right. Beyond that, this is one of the great eating cities: sourdough, Dungeness crab in winter, and a Ferry Building farmers’ market on Saturdays that is a sight in its own right. Book Alcatraz weeks ahead — it sells out, and the ferry is the only way there.

The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.

The guides in United States

wide angle photo of Brooklyn Bridge under cloudy skyNew YorkUnited StatesThe city that never sleepsThe Colorado river winding through the layered walls of the Grand CanyonGrand CanyonUnited StatesA mile deep, and no photograph has ever conveyed itcity with lights turned on during night timeLas VegasUnited StatesA city built to take your money, and extremely good at its jobGolden Gate Bridge during daytimeSan FranciscoUnited StatesSeven square miles of hills, fog and other people’s ideasThe red Canal Street streetcars lined up at the end of the lineNew OrleansUnited StatesThe least American city in America, and the best-feda green bus driving over a bridge in the mountainsDenaliUnited StatesSix million acres, one road, and a mountain that makes its own weatherA hot spring ringed with orange bacterial mats in a Yellowstone geyser basinYellowstoneUnited StatesThe first national park anywhere, sitting on top of a supervolcanobird’s eye view photography of coconut trees under blue skyLos AngelesUnited StatesBeaches, canyons, and a city built for drivingaerial photo of buildings beside beachMiamiUnited StatesArt deco, ocean heat, and a Latin American pulseAnchorage along the shore of Knik Arm, under the snow-covered Chugach mountainsAnchorageUnited StatesA city with moose in the gardens and the whole of Alaska out the back doorAn aerial view of a city with a bridgeJuneauUnited StatesA state capital with no road out, a glacier at the edge of town, and rainWaikiki and the Honolulu skyline along the shore, seen from Diamond Head on OahuOahuUnited StatesWaikiki on one coast, the North Shore on the other, and a volcanic ridge in betweenThe Chicago skyline across Lake Michigan on a clear dayChicagoUnited StatesThe city that invented the skyscraper, on a lake with a horizonThe Yosemite valley at sunrise, El Capitan on the left and Half Dome behindYosemiteUnited StatesA granite valley with waterfalls down both walls, the biggest cliff face in North America at one end, and sequoias older than most countriesThe red walls of Zion canyon seen from the trail above itZionUnited StatesA canyon of red sandstone you walk up the middle of, in the river, with a cliff route so exposed it has chains bolted to itThe Boston skyline across the Charles RiverBostonUnited StatesFour hundred years of American history in a city you can cross on footThe Space Needle and the Seattle skyline with Mount Rainier behind themSeattleUnited StatesWater on both sides, a volcano on the horizon, and the coffee that changed how the world drinks itThe neon signs of Broadway in Nashville at nightNashvilleUnited StatesLive music in every bar on the street, from ten in the morningWhite parasols along the sand at a Maui beach, the headland beyondMauiUnited StatesA volcano you drive up for sunrise above the clouds, a coast road of waterfalls and one-lane bridges, and whales in the channel all winterDelicate Arch on its slickrock bowl at sunset, near MoabMoabUnited StatesA desert town between two national parks, with two thousand stone arches on one side, a canyon labyrinth on the other, and the Colorado river through the middleLava running in bright orange channels over black rock on Hawaiʻi IslandHawaiʻi Island (the Big Island)United StatesAn island with eleven of the world’s thirteen climate zones, a volcano that has erupted in most recent years, and the best stargazing on earth from the top of Mauna KeaKauaʻi from the air, buildings along a curve of green coastKauaʻiUnited StatesThe oldest and greenest Hawaiian island: a canyon Mark Twain called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, a coast with no road along it, and rain that made all of itThe dome of the United States Capitol against a clear skyWashington, DCUnited StatesA capital of free museums on a two-mile lawn, cherry blossom for two weeks a year, and a metro that actually goes where you wantA palm-lined street of high-rises in downtown San DiegoSan DiegoUnited StatesThe most comfortable weather in the United States, a park bigger than Central Park with fifteen museums in it, and the Mexican border twenty minutes southThe columns and steps of the old Custom House in CharlestonCharlestonUnited StatesPastel houses on a peninsula between two rivers, the best restaurant town in the American south, and the fort where the civil war started in the harbourA corner building of shops and awnings at dusk in Key WestKey WestUnited StatesThe end of the road: 160 kilometres of bridges to an island nearer Havana than Miami, where the sunset is a nightly performance and Hemingway’s cats still have six toesThe orange hoodoos of the Bryce amphitheatre under a blue skyBryce CanyonUnited StatesAn amphitheatre of orange rock spires at 2,500 metres, best at sunrise, and some of the darkest skies left in the country after itRed sandstone buttes under a blue sky at SedonaSedonaUnited StatesRed sandstone buttes around a small town of galleries and trailheads, with the Grand Canyon two hours north and a vortex on every hill according to someA Joshua tree in the desert scrub under a wide blue skyJoshua TreeUnited StatesWhere two deserts meet: spiked trees out of a children’s book, granite piles climbers come from everywhere for, and a sky with the Milky Way in itThe folded badlands of Death Valley in low lightDeath ValleyUnited StatesThe hottest and lowest place in North America: salt flats below sea level, dunes, a crater and a painted canyon, all within an hour of each otherA snow-streaked peak above a green valley in Glacier National ParkGlacier National ParkUnited StatesA road over the top of the Rockies past hanging valleys and waterfalls, with grizzly bears in the bottom of them and glaciers that will be gone within a generationThe Teton range rising straight out of the flat valley floorGrand TetonUnited StatesMountains that rise four thousand metres straight out of a flat valley with no foothills, a river of moose and beavers under them, and Yellowstone an hour northThe Big Sur coast from above, a cove of turquoise water under the cliffsBig SurUnited StatesNinety miles of cliff road between the mountains and the Pacific, with redwoods in the canyons and nowhere to stay that is not booked months aheadVineyard country under the hills of the Napa ValleyNapa ValleyUnited StatesThirty miles of vineyards between two ranges, four hundred wineries on them, and a train and a balloon to see it fromLake Tahoe at sunrise, an island in the bay and the pines in silhouetteLake TahoeUnited StatesA lake of startling blue at 1,900 metres with mountains all round it, a dozen ski resorts on them, and a casino strip where the state line crosses the shoreThe towers of downtown Austin from aboveAustinUnited StatesLive music every night of the week, barbecue worth queueing three hours for, and a river full of swimmers in a city that hits 38°CThe Portland sign over Broadway in downtown Portland, OregonPortlandUnited StatesA city of bookshops, food carts and bridges under a volcano, with the Columbia gorge and the Pacific each an hour awayThe Philadelphia skyline lit gold at sunsetPhiladelphiaUnited StatesWhere the country was declared, with the art museum steps Rocky ran up, a covered market since 1893, and the best cheesesteak argument in AmericaA horse carriage on a street under the live oaks in SavannahSavannahUnited StatesTwenty-two garden squares under live oaks hung with Spanish moss, a river of cargo ships at the end of the street, and open containers allowed on itTurquoise window frames set into an adobe wall in Santa FeSanta FeUnited StatesThe oldest capital in the country, built of adobe at 2,100 metres, with the light that brought the painters and green chile on everythingA mid-century motel and palm trees under the mountains at Palm SpringsPalm SpringsUnited StatesMid-century modern houses under a 3,000-metre mountain, a tram to the snow at the top of it, and two hundred days of sun a year