By: MJ + PJ
INTRODUCTION
This post is one of three post-trip analysis posts which covers what we got up to, how much it cost, how we got around, and how these aspects panned out over different regions and countries. The three posts are:
- Costs by Country – this post – containing:
- Daily Costs and Days Visiting, by Continent
- Average USD Cost/Day and Days Visited, by Country
- Average Daily Cost By Country In Order Visited
- US States – Average Daily Cost and Number of Days Visited
- Average USD Daily Cost Per Month of Travel
- A GeoChart showing cost as a color gradient
- Accommodation and Activities
- Transportation
As we progressed through our months travelling, we kept track of our daily activities and costs on a spreadsheet. That record can be found on our 365 Data page – it now serves as an overview of basic metrics. To provide information on how to search the spreadsheet, we also published a post titled 365 Data: Searching the Data.
How are these three pages different? The main difference is that we have filtered the data to better reflect the data for time in a country. Read on!
CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION
One of the challenges we had when planning our trip was not understanding what the nitty-gritty travel details might be like. There was no source of answers, for the questions we had. We felt having a reference point would guide our expectations of how the trip would play out over a year. These three Post-Trip posts provide the kind of information we sought during our planning. We hope these posts help you to answer some detail oriented questions you may have in planning your own adventure.
This page takes a different look at the costs associated with a year’s travel around the world compared to our 365 DATA page (which was an ongoing tally of numerous variables). Of note on the topic of finance, the 365 DATA page had daily and monthly spending figures, and the percent of days we were in numerous budget brackets. While these are useful for the months of our particular trip, it did not show a more useful metric – what it cost per region or country. This page should help shed light on those questions for those planning their own trip around the world.
Over 13 months (400 days) of travel our gross costs were USD $87,089. As we were departing the US to live in Australia, we had many separation “refunds” we were able to deduct from our costs. These refunds included things like tax, insurance, utilities, escrow, credit card rewards, and money from items sold after we left. These totaled USD $12,599. After these deductions our total net cost was USD $74,490. No, it was not a cheap adventure, but: there were three of us for 400 days, we had deliberately saved leading into the trip, and we used some of our house sale profits. So, taking $87,089 – divided by 3 people – is $29,029. Could you currently live in one place (all expenses) for a year on just over $29,000?
We understand that is a lot of money. It was totally worth it. If asked, we would struggle to nominate something else to buy with such money that gave us such life. Read our budget posts to see how we saved and set this adventure up.
It is worth mentioning loss of money due to error. We were quite careful, and so only had to deal with a few losses ($517), these being: AirBNB cancellation, AJ broke a bed, ticket discount blunders, and the Bolivia visas. We did not call getting ripped off on occasion in Peru a loss – those are lessons, and that is travel! The flip side is that we did get some bonus free things which reduced our costs (avoided $652), these being: numerous free bonus tours with Sandemans in Europe (using their loyalty card to earn free tours), and our credit card annual fee waived two years in a row. We feel we came out unscathed on this play-it-as-best-you-can aspect of finance!
We had credit card fraud twice. It is wise to monitor your finances to accommodate this real risk. The first occurrence was an online fraudulent charge that occured while we were in Maryland, USA – we suspect someone had skimmed the card at a gas station in the week prior. The second was while we were in Oxford, England – someone was scanning cards at an ATM machine. Both of these incidences were quickly resolved through our bank, and both times we had a replacement card within a few days.
CLEANING THE DATA
In looking through our daily data we found we would have to ‘remove’ some figures to clearly show country costs, and make some date adjustments so expenses matched their location. This was rather tedious but we think it provides a better representation of costs in each particular region and country. Here are the two main ways in which we adjusted the data:
- We removed the arrival and/or departure costs for distant countries if it involved high cost transits. That is, we took out the ticket costs for long haul flights and long haul trains. Our reasoning is that getting to a country is going to be a variable cost depending where you are coming from. For example: to get to Ireland from Europe is quite reasonable, but to get to Ireland from Australia is very expensive. Ireland should not be reported as really expensive, just because your ticket to get there was really expensive. If you plan your trip to jump the least amount of oceans or take the least amount of long haul flights, these costs can be quite low or at least infrequent.
Therefore, when looking at the country costs on this page, we advise you to think about your international transit separately from the place you are going to (i.e. this first adjustment listed above). Consider it will cost $X to get there from Y, but once there it should cost about $Z per person per day. Our transition costs for the year totalled USD $11,326 for 10 flights and the Eurail pass. We did not buy ‘around the world’ fight tickets, choosing instead to be more flexible and buying cheaper on known booking variables. These transitions made up about 13% of our total costs. - We had to shift some purchases from the date we made them, to a date for the country they were an actual spent in. This blew out some days’ averages that were previously low, but better reflected the dates the money was utilized. (For example: We purchased our Harry Potter Studio Tour tickets one day while in Chile, so moved that expense to the day in England when we visited the studios outside London.)
DATA NUANCES
There are a few things to note before we get to the charts and discussions. These are things that clearly affected the integrity of the numbers, and must be appreciated when considering what you see here and in making your own plans.
- We did not spend the same amount of days on each continent or in each country. We spent 15 days “in Africa”, but that was entirely in Tunisia. In contrast we spent 147 days in Europe and saw 14 countries.
- You engage in different types of activities in each country, stay in different types of accommodation in different regions, and use particular transport modes that are specific to the area. (For example: In South America we visited no theme parks, the hostels were family friendly, and there were no commuter trains.)
- If you know someone in an area, your accommodation costs are likely to be lower due to their generosity or local knowledge. This means you might stay longer and have lower living costs.
- Exchange rates fluctuate, and this can be a deciding factor in deciding to visit one country or region over another. We recorded the USD value based on the exchange rate of the day. If you are not travelling on the USD, you will have very different numerical values, but the proportion of values to each other will be consistent. (To determine our exchange rates relative to your period of travel, use this tool and match it to our month in the country.)
THE CHARTS
For each chart we present a short explanation of the chart, followed by some discussion on what it shows and our insights into why it shows what it does. Hopefully this will answer most questions, but it will undoubtedly raise some. If you have a question, please ask it in the comments below so that others can also refer to the further discussions we have there.
For those who are eagle eyed and recall where we went, we will answer a likely question: Yes, we did spend two and a half days in Germany. However we were staying in Austria each night. Salzburg is quite close to the border with Germany. This is why there are only 24 of the 25 countries we ‘visited’ on the charts listing countries. It might be best to consider our Austria-Germany location as ‘Bavaria’.
COUNTRY COSTS CHARTS
Again – if you have questions, please ask in the comments section at the base of this post. Doing so will enable other readers to read additional discussion.
CHART SUMMARY
This chart shows our average daily cost (vertical bar) while on each continent, and the number of days (thin line) we were on each continent. Africa, Asia and Australia are clearly different to the Americas and Europe. For each of these first three continents, we only visited one country for several weeks, and the particular country we were in was more affordable to visit.
DISCUSSION POINTS:
Although it may seem there is a correlation between the number of days and the cost per day, this is a false impression.
In Africa and Asia we only visited one country, for about 15 days in each. Tunisia and Cambodia are quite affordable to travel within. In Australia, we looked around in a borrowed car visiting family and friends for a month before calling an end to our trip – we had limited expenses for accommodation and transport. In Australia, the exchange rate was also favorable (USD 0.68 per AUD 1). We feel our costs on these continents were lower than what you should expect, but not by too much.
New York City in North America was expensive, despite having a house swap for accommodation. We purchased a musical instrument in North Carolina, and had some expensive car repairs performed in Ohio. South America was expensive, but mostly due to the number of special tours and the high costs of being in Chile/Patagonia for a few weeks. Europe is expensive (no surprise!), but we were able to keep costs under control with house swaps and using our rail pass to maximum advantage.
CHART SUMMARY:
This chart shows each country we visited shown in order of average daily cost for our family of three. The lower line shows the number of days we were in the country. This gives a good overview of the total range of average daily costs ($53-$279) for three people. The mean (average) is $165 and one Standard Deviation 65.5, with 2SD capturing countries costing between $99 to $231 per person per day.
DISCUSSION POINTS:
We particularly loved Bolivia ($94) and Portugal ($232). If we had to choose a future vacation based on maximum length of stay for a set cost, we could stay for 2.5x longer in Bolivia. (Strangely, these two countries fall about one standard deviation above and below the mean mentioned above!)
Looking at this chart and knowing the other details of visiting each country, there are a few outliers. Australia was one: costs were abnormally low as discussed on the previous chart, and the numerical value of goods are high but fairly equal in value to the US on the exchange rate at the time of travel. England was another: costs were kept low by obtaining very affordable accommodation and staying in it for about a month; and groceries are remarkably cheap there. Switzerland was a third: while it was probably the smallest country, and we only spent 4 short days there, it cost us about USD $1000; the views are gorgeous, but the cost of groceries are ridiculous.
CHART SUMMARY:
This chart essentially shows the same data as the previous chart. The main difference is that this shows the order visited, which is important. The pink line shows our average cost per day for the trip, being $183/day for a family of 3.
DISCUSSION POINTS:
The main takeaway for this chart is that if you start in expensive countries, you may well find yourself ploughing through your finances above budget. After being in the US we needed somewhere cheaper, so we headed to South America. This worked until we went way south to hike the “W Circuit” in Torres del Paine in Patagonia! We were then going to head to Asia, but ended up in Europe. Europe is known to be both expensive and undeniably worth visiting. We used Tunisia and the Czech Republic as budget relief destinations while in Europe. They both turned out to be unforgettable – excellent and culturally rich destinations.
Undeniably, Italy should have been >$200/day. We were there two weeks, but our accommodation was entirely a free house swap and a visit with our family who had also arrived in Europe. We had planned to spend another month on the road in Asia to end our adventure, but life happens. This would certainly have brought our average down into the $170 range for the trip, but not likely much lower.
CHART SUMMARY:
This chart is a bit crowded. Since the US is so large, we felt it may be useful for travellers from outside of the US to see a state by state cost breakdown. This chart shows daily average cost and the number of days we spent in each of 21 states. There are a lot more left to see!
DISCUSSION POINTS:
There are clearly two outliers on the right of the chart. Maryland was expensive due to the short number of days, the tickets to museums on the Washington Mall, and the ER visit for MJ’s lacerated finger (ironically costly – he was trying to destroy a credit card!). We had one long expensive day crossing Montana into North Dakota – enroute we had the car serviced and bought new tyres. We also drove 1250km (780 miles) that day, so it was an outlier on all metrics!
Looking at the other states: In Virginia, California and Ohio we had relatives who we visited for extended periods which accounts for the yellow spikes for days visiting. We had reduced accommodation costs in those three states as we were primarily staying with (generous) family – 42 of 48 days was private accommodation in those three states. Most states fell into the $100-$250/day average range, these costs were also kept lower by 28 days of camping ($0-$20/night) and 5 days of a house swap. If you travelled in colder months or could not camp, expect an additional $60+/day costs for hotel accommodation across the US.
CHART SUMMARY:
This chart shows the sequence by month of average daily costs for our family of three, with a trend line in red. We only travelled for a few days into July 2019, but it was captured in the data. For this chart remember that we removed the arrival and/or departure costs for distant countries.
DISCUSSION POINTS:
The clear outlier was March 2019, when we were in Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria. Despite that month, the trend was towards us lowering average costs as shown by the red trend line. It would be a stretch to claim we were able to “get better at travel budgeting” enough to truly reduce our costs by almost 50% – the low average month of June 2019 drags the slope down considerably.
On our 365 Data page there is a similar chart (the line chart where you can toggle the variables on/off), however this chart above has the corrections described earlier incorporated. This chart is therefore more reflective of expenses within each month being in the countries.
*TURN YOUR SMART DEVICE TO LANDSCAPE VIEW TO SEE THE MAPS IN FULL VIEW.
GEO CHART SUMMARY:
These two charts provide an ‘at-a-glance’ survey of where the expensive areas are. You can see where we got to in our travels, and clearly where we did not! (Remember: we did spend a few days in Germany, but it did not get a colour thanks to us only recording by sleep location – that being Austria.)
GEO CHART DISCUSSION POINTS:
We did not see all of Canada, but we did go there three times technically speaking – the only country we entered/exited for multiple visits besides England (two visits).
Argentina covers a huge area, and it has a substantial rail network compared to other South American countries. That said, train travel doesn’t seem practical – odd given the eastern terrain is fairly reasonable. The ocean/coastline and road network is their preference. In terms of trade off for time and distance for us: flying a few hours south to Patagonia was much more attractive than taking a 40+ hour train from Buenos Aires or driving for 30+ hours.
In two countries we had connecting flights occur where we did not leave the airport: Romania and China. Obviously these were not counted as ‘visiting a country’. We could claim China, as we did exit through customs in a last chance attempt to get our Cambodia visas printed (a requisite), since we could not get to a printer despite several Parisian attempts. (Note: If you use Gmail you won’t be able to access it in China. Experience matters!) We’d really like to add China as a country we visited by scratching it off our “World Scratch Map” because of this drama, but we haven’t.
Since we were moving to Australia we had to weigh up our plans to explore Asia. We figured while we were in Europe, that it would be wise to stay for the full 90 day visa – to get back there would be costly from Australia, compared to just flying north into Asia from Australia. Next time Asia!
That was a lot! Our other two pages in this set of three skip the contextual information – you go straight to the charts, and there are four charts on each page. Visit them via the buttons below:
