How much does a Mongolia tour cost?

The honest answer is that a Mongolia tour is priced per day, and the single biggest factor in the per-person cost is how many of you are travelling together. Here is exactly how our pricing works, with no packages and no hidden line items.

The daily rate (2026)

All of our trips — every fixed itinerary and every custom route — use the same transparent per-person, per-day rate in US dollars. The rate drops as the group grows, because the cost of the vehicle, driver, and guide is shared across more people:

• 2 travellers: USD 230 per person, per day
• 3–4 travellers: USD 170 per person, per day
• 5–6 travellers: USD 135 per person, per day
• Solo travellers: rates on inquiry — write to us and we’ll quote a fair single rate

The total price of a trip is simply the daily rate × the number of days. A 6-day Gobi loop for two people, for example, works out to USD 230 × 6 = USD 1,380 per person. The same trip for a group of four is USD 170 × 6 = USD 1,020 per person. Nothing about the itinerary changes — only the per-head share of the vehicle and crew.

What’s included

The daily rate is close to all-inclusive once you are in the country. It covers:

• An English-speaking Mongolian guide
• A driver and a 4WD vehicle
• All fuel
• Accommodation — ger camps and nomadic-family stays
• All meals while on tour
• National park and protected-area entry fees

In practice that means once your trip starts in Ulaanbaatar, the day-to-day costs of travelling across the country are already paid for.

What’s not included

We keep these separate rather than burying them in the headline price:

• International flights to and from Mongolia
• Travel insurance (we require it; bring your own policy)
• Festival tickets where relevant (for example, Naadam or the Golden Eagle Festival)
• Domestic flights where an itinerary uses them (for example, the flight to Bayan-Ölgii on the Golden Eagle tour)
• Personal expenses and souvenirs
• Mongolian visa fees, if your nationality requires one

Why group size matters so much

A Mongolia tour is, mechanically, a vehicle and a small crew moving across very long distances. Those costs are largely fixed whether two people travel or six. So the more of you share them, the lower the per-person rate — which is why a couple pays USD 230 a day each and a group of six pays USD 135. If you are a couple hoping for the lower rate, the honest move is to travel with friends rather than to join strangers: we run private trips only, with group sizes of two to six, and we do not combine separate booking parties.

How this compares to the other ways to see Mongolia

Our rate is one point on a wide spectrum, and it is worth knowing the whole of it before you decide. Broadly, there are three ways people travel here, and they cost very different amounts:

• Independent and budget, roughly USD 25–50 a day. Hostels in Ulaanbaatar, canteen meals, and public transport or a shared guesthouse van to get out of the city. Cheapest by a distance, and genuinely viable if you have time, patience, and no fixed schedule. What you give up is reach: the places most people come to Mongolia for are a long way from any bus route.
• Shared group tours, roughly USD 60–140 a day. A van with a driver, a guide, and three to five strangers, sold per seat. This is the middle of the market and it is where most of Mongolia’s tourism sits. You get the distance covered and the costs split further than we can split them. What you give up is control: fixed dates, fixed route, and whoever else booked that van.
• Private tours, USD 135–230 a day. What we do. Your own guide, your own vehicle, your own dates, and a route we build rather than one you join — see the private Mongolia tours page for how that works in practice. Travelers who want the top of this bracket upgraded further (better camps, a hot shower every night where one exists) should read the luxury Mongolia tours page for what “luxury” honestly means out here.

We do not run the first two, and we will not pretend the third is right for everyone. If your budget is USD 50 a day, a private trip is not going to bend to meet it, and you are better served by the hostel-and-shared-van route than by us. If what you want is the specific route, on your dates, with nobody else in the vehicle, that is the thing our rate buys.

The honest middle ground, if the per-person number is what is stopping you, is group size rather than tour type. Six people paying USD 135 each is inside shared-tour territory while still being an entirely private trip. Our Mongolia tour packages page lists the routes that work best for a larger group.

Why Mongolia costs what it does

The question behind the question is usually why a country this affordable to live in is not cheap to travel across. The answer is that almost none of what you pay is accommodation, and almost all of it is distance.

Mongolia is roughly the size of Western Europe with a population smaller than a mid-sized city, and the places worth reaching have no scheduled transport to them. Every trip is a vehicle, a driver, and fuel, for hundreds of kilometres a day on roads that are frequently not roads. Food, water and spare parts are carried rather than bought en route, because for long stretches there is nowhere to buy them. The season is short, roughly May to September, so the same vehicles and guides have to earn their year in five months.

Once you are out of Ulaanbaatar, in other words, your money is not buying luxury. It is buying access.

A few worked examples

• Central Mongolia, 5 days, 2 people: USD 230 × 5 = USD 1,150 per person
• Gobi Desert, 6 days, 4 people: USD 170 × 6 = USD 1,020 per person
• Gobi and Central combined, 10 days, 6 people: USD 135 × 10 = USD 1,350 per person

These are the on-the-ground costs; add your international flights, insurance, and any festival or domestic-flight extras to get your full trip budget.

How custom trips are priced

Custom routes are not more expensive than the fixed itineraries — they use the same daily rates. If none of the published trips fits, we design one around your dates, group, and interests, then quote it on exactly the same per-person-per-day basis. About a quarter of the trips we run are custom.

The full, current rates and inclusions always live on the pricing page. If you’d like a real number for a specific trip, write to us with your dates and how many people are travelling, and we’ll send a complete quote — Baska replies personally, in writing.