Tools : Budget Your Trip

I would like to share with you this web app that we recently discovered : Budget Your Trip. I went on vacation to NY last week and I thought it was the perfect occasion to give this website a test ride.

The site is structured around two main parts : a section where you can find estimated costs for all the countries and the actual budget your trip tool.

Estimate Travel Costs

I think this part is one of the strong point of the website and I love the concept. Basically it’s a list of countries (that you can query) with the estimated costs of travelling there. But the genius idea  is that it’s based on the information provided by the people who used the tracking tool (see below). So you will have a very accurate and up-to-date information coming from people who actually made a trip to the country.

Let’s say you are going for a 3-weeks trip in South-East Asia (Thailand + Laos + Singapore). Well it will only take you 5 minutes to see that you should plan around 30€/day for Thailand, 19€ for Laos and 95€ for Singapore. And you have a detail of the expense so you will note that for instance 90% of the daily budget for Singapore is for the accommodation while the food is very unexpensive (~3€/day). That’s a very interesting information when you plan your trip and you know then that you might rather take time to find a Couchsurfer to host you in Singapore for instance.

Budget your trip

The tool is meant for 2 purposes :

• Plan your costs before the trip

When planning your trip, it’s very useful to be able to estimate your expenses. Even if I feel that you can never really accurately do that, it’s good to have a rough idea of how much cash you need to prepare, whether it is to buy traveler checks or just make sure it’s available on your current account. I’m sure the last thing you want when you travel is to have to phone your parents or best friends for a Transfer Union.

Budget Your Trip provides all the tools to make this cost planning possible. First, the estimation tool will give you the local datas that you might not have already. And then you have a well designed interface to create a new trip and input all the expenses you can think of. A good thing is that you have to enter the date and location of every expense. Using that, the tool will be able to summarize your entire trip and draw according graphs. Very useful for a multi-country or RTW trip. For some reasons you can’t have the itinerary drawn on a map in the planning section but it’s present in the tracking part. It also integrates an internal currency converter which allows you to enter data in any currency and still have your totals in your currency of choice. And you can even share your planning with friends or family to see what they think of it (if your parents are paying for your trip, you might want to hide the booze expenses by increasing the gifts/souvenirs section).

Budget planner

• Track your expenses during (or after) your trip

Once you are actually travelling you can use the website to track your daily expenses.The interface is exactly the same that the one to plan your budget and again it’s quite simple to do that. There’s also a really smart option that allows you to say that you actually made a planned expense (c.f. screenshot below).  By clicking on the blue tick, the expense line will be copied to your budget tracker so that you don’t have to duplicate data. I’m really wondering if you can exactly forecast the real costs though. Still, it’s clever to have the feature.

Validate your planned expenses

I don’t really like keeping a count of every single think dollar I spent and in the end I don’t think it’s really useful and worth the times it takes you. I usually keep in my phone a track of how much cash I get at the ATM and what I pay by card so I know exactly how much I spent in total. And when I come back I try to have a quick look at my statement to make sure all the lines match an expense I actually made.

On a side note, in some countries, it’s frequent that shops and vendors scam you by double-charging your card or saving your info to make fake cards. In Eastern Europe, it’s very frequent and happened to my father recently. Although he was aware of the problem, he used his card once to buy a washing machine for my grandma. A month later, 500€ were distributed by an ATM in Northern Russia (while my father was in Paris).

Once you have finished your trip and entered all your data, you can enjoy nice reports and graphs that can help you planning your next trips. And as I’ve said earlier, you are doing a good thing for the community as all your data will be used to feed the cost estimation tool. Of course you can also choose to keep all that private and not tell the world how you spent 1000€ of Champagne in Saint-Tropez…

Budget tracker

In the end, I think Budget Your Trip can be a very useful tool to help you plan your trip. I’m not really convinced by the tracking part as I’ve said because I don’t really need more than just writing down in my phone or on a paper my expenses during my trip. It’s quite a tedious process to do it during your trip or even more after it when you have accumulated a lot of data. On the other hand if you don’t share your actual expenses, you don’t help the concept of the cost estimation tool. I feel like that would be great to have a mobile app to do so easily on your iPhone or Blackberry while the road. Maybe soon ?

For more information about Budget Your Trip, you should read this really interesting interview from Tech Guide For Travel.

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