Israel just found the best way to help you save money in Tel Aviv by actually not letting you go there.
Go try and figure this one out
The Israeli press has in recent days been shocked—shocked!—to find their commercial (and I would say, spiritual) capital at the top of the list of the world’s most expensive cities: next to Tel Aviv, apparently, Beverly Hills is now a bargain.
There are plenty of reasons for why this is the case, but the main one is that keeping up the cosmopolitan flavor for which Tel Aviv is justly famous is mind-blowingly expensive in a rowdy neighborhood where one ill-timed tweet (or, God forbid, prayer) can result in rockets landing on your rooftop.
So just how expensive is Tel Aviv? As a tourist, you probably don’t care how much it costs to rent an apartment (it’s a lot) or fill a tank of gas (don’t even ask), but things like hotel prices are worth noting. Just a few months ago, while Israel was still closed to tourists meaning that demand was down to practically zero, one of the better known and not super luxurious hotels facing the beach offered us a “special” rate for a partial sea view room of $310 for a single room for one night.
But Israeli ingenuity seems to have come to the rescue again—now you don’t have to fret over how to afford such a “bargain”-priced hotel room or glittering star-chef restaurant because the authorities have yet again shut the country down to tourists. In their questionably infinite wisdom, the relevant authorities have also discouraged Israelis from traveling at all, even though that didn’t stop Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s wife and kids from leaving on a jet plane.
So if you were banking on a sunny pre-Christmas escape to the sultry Tel Aviv seaside, that’s not happening—although Israel’s newish Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz has insisted that the regardless of what does or doesn’t happen with the spread of the Omicron variant the border closure will be lifted upon the conclusion of the initial two-week period. When that does happen, expect testing and quarantine protocols for entry into Israeli territory to be far stricter and more time-consuming than anything you could possibly imagine in the United States.
In the meantime, with the drawbridge of Ben-Gurion International Airport locked firmly in the upright position, think of all the money you’re already saving—Tel Aviv may never be this cheap again!