I spend my days looking at tour prices, so this summer I finally did the boring thing and measured them properly: the 48 most-viewed bookable experiences in each of 50 major cities, 2,400 listings in all, lowest per-person price, converted to euros, taken in August 2026. A few things surprised me.
The typical tour costs about €60 per person, but the gap between cities is fivefold: €29 in New Delhi against €156 in Amman. That sounds like "Asia cheap, Middle East expensive", and it isn't. Amman tops the table because what people book there is Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea: long drives, park fees, 4x4s. Reykjavik and Las Vegas show the same pattern for the same reason (Golden Circle, Grand Canyon). The expensive cities aren't expensive; their day trips are.
Averages lie, too. Istanbul's mean tour price in the sample is €404. Its median is €87. A handful of multi-day Cappadocia packages listed next to two-hour city walks drags the arithmetic mean into fantasy. If an article quotes an "average tour price" without saying which average, it's quoting noise.
And the most stable product in travel is the plain walking tour: from Krakow to Kyoto a guided city walk costs €25–€35. Everything above that line is transport, tickets and time.
The full sortable table, the methodology and the raw CSV are free to reuse here:
https://excurgo.com/prices
A follow-up I did in September might interest the "destination dupes" crowd: Trieste instead of Venice, Ghent instead of Amsterdam, Valencia instead of Barcelona. Hotels are cheaper in the dupe; tours mostly aren't. In 29 comparable pairs the dupe's tours were cheaper in 15 and pricier in 14, a coin flip, except day trips, which were cheaper in the dupe in 16 of 24 pairs:
https://excurgo.com/prices/destination-dupes
Happy to share the data for any city that's not in the 50 if someone needs it for a trip plan.
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