Trip Budget Calculator

How this calculator treats your numbers

Four inputs drive the result, and two of them behave differently from the other two. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a budget comes out roughly half or double what it should be.

• Lodging / night is multiplied by the number of nights only. It is the cost of the room, not the cost per person. If two of you share a double room at 90, enter 90, not 180.
• Food / day / person is multiplied by days and by travellers. Enter what one person eats in a day.
• Activities / day / person works the same way: one person, one day.
• Local transport / day is multiplied by days only, like lodging. Enter what the group spends moving around in a day.

So a seven-day trip for two people at 90 a night, 35 each for food, 25 each for activities and 15 a day for transport comes to 630 + 490 + 350 + 105 = 1,575 in total, or about 788 each.

The calculator has no currency attached. Put every figure in the same currency and read the answer in that currency. If you are pricing a trip in a currency you do not think in, run the total through our Currency Converter at the end rather than converting each input as you go. It is faster and you avoid compounding rounding errors.

What it deliberately leaves out

This estimates what a trip costs once you are there. It does not include international flights, visas or entry fees, travel insurance, vaccinations, equipment you buy beforehand, or the deposit on a rental car. Those are one-off sums that do not scale with trip length, so folding them into a per-day model distorts the picture.

The practical approach is to treat the calculator’s total as your on-the-ground budget, then add the fixed costs separately. A useful habit is to write the fixed costs down first, because they are the ones that decide whether a trip is affordable at all: a 1,500 on-the-ground budget means something very different attached to a 200 flight than to a 1,400 one.

Building inputs you can trust

The weakness of any budget tool is that it will faithfully multiply bad inputs. A few ways to make yours closer to reality:

Price lodging for your actual dates. Accommodation is the input that varies most, and it varies by season, day of the week and how far ahead you book. Look up two or three real places for the dates you want rather than using a remembered average.

Separate the food number into meals. “35 a day” is hard to sanity-check. “Coffee and pastry, a cheap lunch, a sit-down dinner” is easy to price against real menus, and it immediately tells you whether the number is generous or tight for that destination.

Do not average activities across the whole trip. Most trips have two or three expensive days (a guided dive, a park entry, a long day tour) and several days that cost almost nothing. Add the big-ticket items up, divide by the trip length, and use that as the per-day figure.

Check whether transport is really a daily cost. In a compact city you may walk most days. On a route-based trip, intercity tickets can dwarf everything local. If your trip is mostly long hops between places, price those separately as fixed costs rather than smearing them across the days.

Run it twice

The single most useful thing you can do with a budget estimate is produce two of them: a comfortable version and a lean version. Keep the trip length and traveller count identical and change only the three discretionary inputs. The gap between the two totals is your real flexibility, and it tells you where the money actually is: for most trips it is lodging, not the daily spending that people tend to worry about.

It is also worth running the same numbers at a different trip length. Because lodging and transport scale with days while the fixed costs do not, a longer trip often costs less per day than a short one. If you are choosing between five days and eight, the calculator will show you what those three extra days genuinely add.

Where to go next

Once the budget looks plausible, the next questions are usually when to go and how long to stay. Both are covered per destination in our destination guides and country guides, which include a best-time-to-visit section and, where relevant, a suggested trip length. For the practical planning sequence, see Plan Your Trip.