Budget in Bangkok
A visual guide from the Bangkok travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Bangkok is one of the few big cities where a good day out costs less than a taxi ride home in Europe. A plate of pad kaphrao with a fried egg from a street kitchen runs somewhere around 50 to 70 baht; the same dish in a mall food court is roughly double, and in a hotel restaurant many times that. Transport is similarly stratified, with BTS hops costing a few tens of baht and a metered taxi across town rarely breaking 150. Where budgets tend to break is drinks, because imported alcohol is taxed hard.
Rough daily numbers
As a working guide, a backpacker in a hostel dorm, eating from markets and using the BTS, spends roughly 1,000 to 1,500 baht a day. A comfortable mid-range trip, meaning a decent three- or four-star room, a mix of street food and restaurants, a couple of taxis and one rooftop drink, lands nearer 3,000 to 4,500. Hostel beds typically start around 300 to 600 baht and solid mid-range hotels around 1,200 to 2,500. Treat all of this as indicative rather than fixed: rates roughly double over Christmas and New Year and soften noticeably during the September and October rains.
Where to save
Buy a Rabbit card for the BTS to skip the ticket queues, and use the Chao Phraya express boat, where the orange-flag service costs about the price of a bottle of water and doubles as a river tour. From Suvarnabhumi, the Airport Rail Link to Phaya Thai is a fraction of a taxi fare, though a metered taxi plus tolls stays reasonable for two or more people. Mall food courts such as Terminal 21's Pier 21 are cheap, cool and paid by stored-value card. Convenience-store beer costs a fraction of bar prices, and the parks and the BACC galleries are generally free.