I've heard stories of wealthy Europeans spending years on their travels to China and other distant countries, or how traveling to Singapore by ship 1800's took months before Suez canal, but I've rarely seen any estimates on cost of doing the trip. Same goes for traveling by train or ship in 1800's - I've heard both were prohibitively expensive even for the middle class.
Today, traveling to any major city in the world seems to cost no more than an average worker's two weeks salary and the trip won't usually take longer than 20 hours.
I'd like to know how has the cost and time of travel changed historically through time beginning from middle ages to present. How much an European would have had to pay in today's money for a visit to any major cities of other continents, and how long the trip would have taken?
Leisure holiday travel for the masses only began with the advent of a middle class in a capitalist economy. The first travel guides were published in the late 18th / early 19th century. So whereas the wealthy could always "travel", the idea of it as a thing the masses could do only started when a societal class with disposal income and time was born in Europe during the industrial revolution. (Source: Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawm.)
For costs, I'm sure somebody else may be able to answer. It is always difficult translate historical costs into modern costs. For travel times, it obviously took a lot longer. So the first travel guides focused on "European" vacations (travelling to Provence, Italy, Greece, etc) for the middle classes developing in France, England, Germany and the low countries. My guess is from there guides to the "Holy Land" would have been next. From there, travel to either Africa / Asia or the New World would have been far to expensive and time consuming to be realistic for the middle classes before the advent of regularly scheduled oceanic passenger transportation.
For an ancient example of a "travel guide" see Pausanias.