It depends! Are you a super budget traveler (sleeping in hostel dorms or couchsurfing, cooking all your own food, doing little to no paid tours or activities, taking buses) or do you prefer to travel in the lap of luxury (sleeping in nice hotels, eating out with alcohol for every meal, doing guided tours everywhere, flying first class)? We were somewhere in the middle, so hopefully our completely transparent total cost for 50 weeks of travel (350 days) will help you estimate how much you need to save for your RTW trip.
We travel on a budget but not on a shoestring. As you’ll see below, we made a lot of non-budget-friendly choices on our trip, including occasionally staying at nice resorts, participating in expensive activities like scuba diving and wine tours, joining a guided group tour in India, and eating at a lot of restaurants. Over the past 50 weeks, we tracked every. single. cent. we spent. This means in addition to major categories like food, accommodation and transportation, we also tracked every time we paid to use a public bathroom, lost money in a currency exchange, tipped the housekeeping staff, bought a postcard stamp, etc. We saved $5,000 for each month of the trip (planning for 12 months), but we ended up coming home two weeks early. So, for 11.5 months, our budget was $57,500. How do you think we did?
Spoiler alert: We were under budget! We only went over budget on two individual months: June (when we made it rain in Portugal with soccer games and rental cars and lots of wine) and November (I blame Jordan; that country is so expensive!). We came in well under budget (less than $4,000 total) during four full months: July (spent in the Balkans, Budapest and eastern Slovakia), August (Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics), October (the Caucasus are amazingly affordable), and February (Southeast Asia, widely known as a great budget destination).
(Psst: Want to know more about how much a specific country costs? Check out our Money & Budgeting page for detailed expense reports!)
Total: $52,810.22
Total per person per month: $2,296.10
Total daily cost per person: $75.44
Don’t think you can save this much money? Or just don’t want to spend this much? Don’t worry! You can easily spend thousands of dollars less than we did by doing a few things differently:
We really like drinks. And coffee. And food. That other people prepare for us.
We like to drink. Sometimes a lot. Cut out (or even just cut down) on your alcohol consumption, and you can save a bundle!
Same for coffee. We went to coffeeshops for espresso drinks almost every day (sometimes more than once a day!). If you make your own coffee (or skip it altogether), you can save even more.
Speaking of consumption, we ate out for almost every single meal. At the beginning of our trip, especially in Mexico and Europe, we were better about buying groceries and preparing food in our room, at least for breakfast. But even then, we probably only prepared 1-2 lunches or dinners each week. After Slovenia (which we visited in September) I don’t think we “cooked” again until … well … we made a cheese plate in Baku (October) and that might have been it! We seriously ate out all. the. time. Any “groceries” we did buy in the second half of our trip was mostly chips and beer. So be better than us; cook in your hostel or apartment and save more.
(That being said, if you’re in a country with inexpensive street food–say Mexico or Malaysia–you might actually save more by eating out if you visit the right vendors! So “don’t eat out” isn’t a budget tip for every country. Enjoy.)
Average cost of food and drinks per day: $19.72/day pp
Average cost of food and drinks per day not counting “treats” (alcohol/coffee/dessert/snacks not purchased as part of a meal or from a grocery store): $16.15/day pp
TLDR: Cut out the treats and save $2,600 over the course of a year-long RTW trip! And you can still buy drinks/desserts with your meals or at the grocery store. Cut them out altogether and save even MORE.
We stayed in private rooms.
Speaking of accommodations; we stayed in private rooms every night (except one night in a hostel dorm in Lisbon), and most times we also had a private bathroom. About half our nights were spent in “entire apartments” via Airbnb or Booking.com, and we also stayed at quite a few hotels, especially when we got to Southeast Asia. In general, we tried to spend around $30/night on lodging. When we were in really affordable places, we treated ourselves to fancier places when we could have easily spent less in a totally comfortable room. Stay in shared accommodations (or stay for free using sites like Housesitting, Workaway, WWOOF, Couchsurfing, etc.) and save a boatload.
Average cost of lodging per night: $38* per couple or $19/night pp
*This average is a true reflection of the amount we paid for each night of lodging (259 nights). If we used points, stayed with family, spent the night on a bus/train/boat, slept in an airport, etc., I did not include the $0 cost in this average. When I do include our free nights of lodging, our average drops to only $28/night or $14/night pp.
We (sometimes) chose faster transportation over cheaper options.
We did take buses and trains often, but if land transportation was going to be really long or possibly unsafe, we splurged for plane tickets. If you’re willing to do more overland travel, you can certainly save some money. Over the entire year, we spent $8,841.65 on flights, including $2,161.98 on our long-haul “out and back” flights to start and end the trip (California to Portugal, and Vietnam to California). Other benefits to overland travel versus air travel? You get to see more of the landscape (and maybe even stop in some tiny towns you would never experience otherwise), meet more people, listen to audiobooks and reduce your carbon footprint.
For most of the year, we prioritized local metro and bus systems over taking taxis or ride-shares, which saved a lot of money. We barely took any taxis or ride-shares until the last few months of our trip, when we started getting lazy. 😉 Throughout the entire year, I think we were pretty good about walking as much as we could, which is free!
Total cost of transportation between destinations (planes, trains, buses, boats, taxis, transfers, etc.): $12,018.18 ($17.17/day pp)
Total cost of local transportation (intracity buses, metro, taxis, ride-shares, rental cars, etc.): $3,370.96 ($4.82/day pp)
We visited a LOT of countries.
We visited 37 countries on five continents during our RTW trip, not including our trip back to the U.S. (see below). If you look at any RTW blogs, you might notice that is a lot of countries to visit in just 11.5 months! We hadn’t planned on visiting that many at the beginning of the trip, but sometimes we just got excited and couldn’t help ourselves, especially in eastern Europe when it was so easy to hop on a bus and cross borders. In hindsight, we visited 32 countries (including the U.S.) in the first 7.5 months of our trip, and only six countries in the last four months, once we arrived in Southeast Asia. I think the pace for the end of our trip is more typical of RTW trips. If you visit fewer places, not only will you save on transportation costs (see above) but also probably on lodging costs, as you can find “long-stay” discounts on Airbnb or use Housesitting or Workaway as free accommodation options.
Also, when you stay in one place longer, you probably won’t do paid activities and tours as often, so your average daily spending will naturally go down. (For example, say there are five tours/attractions you want to check off in Mexico City; doing those things over one month instead of one week will be the same total amount, but a much lower average daily cost.)
We went home during our trip.
We traveled back to our home base (the U.S.) for about 10 days over the summer. I did some number-crunching and figured we would have saved more than $800 by going straight from Colombia to Portugal, rather than going to the U.S. in between, even accounting for all the money we saved on food and lodging by staying with family in the U.S. So if you keep moving in one general direction and don’t take any big detours, you can save, too!
We splurged on several many big-ticket items.
We got certified to scuba dive ($320 pp); took several pricey wine tours (~$90 – $125 pp for each tour); attended a few professional sporting events in Portugal (~$175 pp); visited expensive countries like Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Singapore; took a hot air balloon ride in Egypt ($80 each); rented several cars, including a camping vehicle in Costa Rica ($104/day); and took an 8-day guided group tour in India ($118/day pp, excluding food). We also enjoyed multiple massages, baths and spa treatments (ranging from $5 to $100 pp each time), joined food tours (~$40 – 75 pp each time), ordered custom tailored clothes in Vietnam (~$275), took guided tours and day trips (e.g. $69 pp for a kayaking trip in Costa Rica and $123 pp for a private transfer from Sarajevo to Belgrade), and coughed up steep entrance fees at several national parks and tourist attractions (e.g. $43 pp for Komodo National Park in Indonesia and $39 pp for Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia). You can skip any of these things (or all of them) to quickly save hundreds of dollars. You can also save on admission fees to many tourist attractions by visiting in the shoulder or off-seasons.
Total entertainment cost: $7,498.02 ($10.71/day pp)
Total gifts/souvenirs cost (mostly postcards & stamps, but also includes $275 worth of tailored clothing from Vietnam): $779.94 ($1.11/day pp)
We hoarded our points.
We didn’t spend many of our credit card points during our trip (I think we only used them for two hotel stays totaling 10 nights) because we were hoping to fly business class home at the end. 😉 But, our journey home ended up being quite different than we had imagined, so we had lots of points left at the end of our trip: about $3,200 worth of points. If we had used our points more often throughout the trip (Chase Sapphire Rewards points can be used not just for hotels and flights, but also for guided tours!), we could have saved about $3k.
Whew, that was a lot of information (and numbers), but we hope you found it helpful! Do you have other questions about money or budgeting? Ask away!
Featured image: “Autonomous Resonating Life On The Water And Resonating Trees,” a temporary art exhibit at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore
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