The Complicated Matter of Estimating Travel Expenses

At least once a month I’ll get an e-mail or blog comment from a reader asking for help in estimating travel expenses for this country or that. Like “How much should I budget for three months in Thailand and Vietnam?” To me that feels like asking a psychiatrist that you’ve never met how to save your failing relationship. Without a lot of follow-up questions, she can only take a shot in the dark.

In The World’s Cheapest Destinations book I break down a lot of typical expenses in different countries for recurring items like lodging, food, drinks, and ground transportation. I then provide some rather wide ranges of what it’ll probably cost you on a day-to-day basis for budget and mid-range travelers. The point of it all is to show which destinations are a relative bargain compared to others you could visit instead. 

The problem is, I don’t know your money habits or how you travel, or even where you’re going within that country, so the biggest variable of all is always going to be missing: you. I don’t know how much you need to buy beforehand, how many sacrifices you’ll willing to make to save money on lodging or buses, or how much you like to shop.

I also don’t know how much you are going to party. Or whether friends are going to meet up with you along the way somewhere. Or whether you are willing to splurge on worthy adventure excursions or side tours. Obviously your choice of destinations makes a massive difference—three months in Southeast Asia will cost a fraction of three months in Scandinavia no matter how you travel—but budgets vary a lot from person to person.

Figure Out What’s “Normal” in Your Travels

When my now-wife and I set off on our first round-the-world trip of an eventual three, we were total newbies. We really had no idea what things were actually going to cost besides what we saw in guidebooks. Those were the pre-internet days. So what guided our budget was simply how much we had after airfare, shots, backpacks, and other long-term travel expenses that we would pay up front. 

Our budget ended up being $20 a day, which is the equivalent of around $32 in today’s dollars, or $640 per month today. For everything. We were definitely staying in a lot of no-star hotels and guesthouses. Sometimes with more than a few critters flying or scurrying around. 

So instead of trying to figure out what things were going to cost and matching our budget to that, we figured out what we had to spend per month and found a way to make it work. This limited us to the cheapest countries and even then, in some places that budget was fairly easy to stick to and we had money left over. In others it was tougher and we had to tighten up.

When we spent a month in Holland and England at the end, it was impossible. Thankfully by then we’d been working a bit and we had people to stay with, but we still ended up putting some expenses on credit cards just before we headed home. 

If you do want to plan ahead more instead of being surprised, that’s easier now. I’ve got some resources for you in the next section. In general though, these are going to be your main expenses over the course of a month: 

Lodging

This is usually the biggest if you’re not moving around constantly. It’s also the easiest one to budget in advance just by doing a little internet research. You can check Booking.com to get sample hotel prices and there are a lot of apartment rentals on there too. If you’re staying in one place for a month, that’s easier to check on Airbnb, where many owners have built-in discounts for staying that long. 

Be honest with yourself about how much comfort you need though. You may say you’re okay sleeping in hostels and crappy hotels with shared baths and cold showers, but if you’ve never done that before and you’re used to business chain hotels, you might find it more difficult than you anticipated. If you need mid-range places instead, you’ll need to step up to a a mid-range travel budget. 

Travel Transportation

This can be the biggest expense if you’re playing “check the boxes” and going somewhere new every day or two instead of spending far less from being a slow traveler. It’ll also be a bigger expense when you’re in a country with nice trains and/or buses instead of ones where crossing an entire island in a chicken bus will cost you two bucks.

Flights across an ocean are expensive, but quick flights within Europe or Asia can be less than the taxi upon arrival. I just bought a whole slew of train tickets for Europe travel coming up and those ranged from 20 euros to 55, the latter being a nine-hour trip. Covering that distance in Thailand or Vietnam may cost you half as much. 

Food and Drink on the Road

This may be the biggest expense if this is your biggest priority, or when in places with really cheap hotel prices. It can also be your biggest expense if you’re getting free lodging by being a house sitter or doing some kind of home exchange scheme. Or doing a job where housing is included but food isn’t. 

Regardless, the resources at the bottom can help with some estimates and you’ll often spend less on food if you’ve got a place where you can cook at least some of the time. 

Adventures, Admissions, and Tours

This is basically your fun and sightseeing budget, for all the things you want to do when you get to a place that aren’t free. The more things you want to do, the higher this line item needs to be, especially for guided excursions to remote areas and tours that involve boats.

If you’re going to rent a car anywhere, that expense should probably go in here rather than in transportation because you’re using the car to see more. If you’re going to do a lot of sightseeing, it can make sense to batch it because you can save money with one of those city passes that includes a lot of attractions and sometimes unlimited transportation. 

Everything Else

The “everything else” bucket will usually be minor compared to the rest of these, but it does need to be a part of your budget. There are routine expenses like toiletries, replacement clothing, bug spray, and the like, but also medical issues can pop up and you may need to pay for visas along the way sometimes. 

If you take our shoestring budget as an example, $640 per month in today’s dollars might mean $40 or $50 per month set aside as “misc.” 

Resources for Estimating Travel Expenses

You can still get a lot of solid pricing information from guidebooks and the info is all in one place. You’ll see actual examples of hotel rates, bus prices, restaurant main dish prices, and museum admission costs. It’ll save you hours of searching since it’s vetted information and you don’t have to keep bouncing around different online sources. 

Here are some places to research prices online though. 

Numbeo

One source I use a lot for expat costs research can also at least give you a general idea for travel. That’s Numbeo.com, a crowdsourced site that lists prices for a wide range of products and services, from vegetables to a beer or coffee to the price of a movie ticket. It’s great for comparing city to city to see, for example, how much more Prague is going to cost you than Sofia, or how Mexico City compares to Medellin for costs. 

If you look at Numbeo for Chiang Mai, for example, the digital nomad favorite, you’ll find that the people who spend time there say it’ll cost an average of $1.86 for a simple meal, $1.75 for a cappuccino, $1.12 for a kilo of bananas, $5.21 for a 3km taxi ride, and $413 for a one-bedroom apartment in the city center. Good info! 

And in case you were wondering, “rent prices in Chiang Mai are 86.1% lower than in Singapore.” Figure on about the same ratio or worse for hotels.  

Budget My Trip

A similar site that’s more travel-oriented is BudgetMyTrip. I have found that this one works better for small countries without much variation than it does for large ones with popular tourist zones. It’s quite accurate for Bosnia, for example, where there’s no area with inflated tourist prices. It’s a different story for my adopted country of Mexico, where prices in Playa del Carmen, Tulum, or Los Cabos are double or triple what you’ll spend in Guanajuato or Queretaro. 

You have to choose “budget” from the pull-down tab to get a reasonable cost level too. Otherwise it’s geared to short vacationers more than long-term travelers. It says a month in Mexico will cost a couple $2,324 if on a budget, which is doable outside of the resort areas. If you choose “all” however, that jumps up to more than $6,000. You have to be staying at some nice hotels to spend that much in the interior of Mexico. 

For Malaysia it has $1,920 for budget, or $64 per day for two, which seems high. They have $5,399 for midrange, definitely high unless you’re drinking every day, and a shocking $17K for one month at the top level. Jeez, there are expats living on that for an entire year!

Nomads.com and WeNomad

I don’t really trust either of these sites fully for estimating travel expenses as I feel like there’s a lot of “garbage in, garbage out” to them that defies all logic. There’s no way that anyone who has spent time in both Mexico and Spain will believe that Barcelona is nearly 3X more expensive than Mexico City. Or that it’s the same price as Copenhagen!

That’s what it says on Nomads.com though: 

WeNomad is a little better but it always makes me scratch my head because of oddities that will pop up every few lines on the home page. They also seem to feature a lot of cities where the only expats there are working for the State Department or an oil company.

When you do find ones favored by nomadic types, the information seems wrong as much as it’s right. They’ve got Bansko costing more than Phuket, Budapest costing twice as much as Playa del Carmen, and Valencia being more expensive than Vienna. Nope, nope, and nope. 

Still, they’re fun to play around with and if enough people have entered info, they may give you a starting point on typical expenses. 

Regional Websites for Estimating Travel Expenses

If you can find a website or blog that specializes in a certain country or region, that will often be a great resource for estimating travel expenses. The founder or editor usually lives in the area and is regularly writing about how much things cost. 

When I first traveled around Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania, I used Chasing the Donkey to figure out what was normal for hotels and transportation.

TravelFish has been covering Southeast Asia for more than two decades.

Laura Bronner, who wrote this post about travel prices in Lithuania when she lived there, runs this good Spain Travel Guru site with lots of price info.  

Dig around for where you’re going to spend some time and you should eventually find a site that covers that region in depth, rather than you randomly surfing one-off articles that may or may not be accurate. 

Long-term Travel Blogs

Now that half the travelers on RTW trips seem to be bloggers as well, you can get a peek into the process of how much people are actually spending during their round-the-world trip—and what has driven up expenses beyond what they expected. This is a common blog post tactic when nomads are roaming the world and writing about it, documenting what they spent and what was a surprise.

Follow your favorites for a while and you’ll get an idea of what they’re spending. Just make sure they’re paying their own way though. There are a lot of pro bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, and TikTok stars who are being hosted regularly in exchange for publicity. I do the same sometimes and am not criticizing that, but it’s hard for them to tell you what you are going to spend if they’ve set up most of their lodging and experiences through barter arrangements or media trips. 

Naturally, since this is The Cheapest Destinations Blog, I’ve got a lot of price information for various value destinations. Usually they’re places featured in my book, like Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, or Bulgaria, but sometimes I’ll cover a mid-range destination as well, like this rundown on travel prices in Greece after I spent two months there. 

I also give lots of advice on how to keep your overall budget in check. For example, if you fly to a cluster of cheap countries and then head to another cluster, you can do a lot of overland travel between those expensive plane tickets to another continent. 

My buddy Nora Dunn lays out how much she spent every year when she was a nomad in this article and it ranged from $17K to $51K, which shows how much variation there can be depending on the where and the how. I’m also friends with Roger Wade, who has lots of good travel expenses information on his site Price of Travel. 

There used to be a lot of good specific advice on message boards from the likes of Lonely Planet and BootsnAll, but now most of that has moved to groups/threads on general third-party platforms like Reddit and Facebook. And it’s harder to figure out who knows what they’re talking about. You might have better luck with the boards from Fodor’s and Rick Steves that are still hanging on. 

Of course I have to plug this resource, because it’ll save you a lot of time and hassle when estimating travel expenses: 

How about you? What resources did you use to plan your long-term travels?