World Trip Expenses – A Deeper Dive
We tracked our spending on this trip for simple budgetary purposes so we would know how long we could afford to keep traveling, but it turns out that these records are a wealth of information that tell us all sort of interesting things about our trip. A deeper dive into over 2,600 line items of expenses tells us how often we moved around, where our cheapest accommodations were, where our highest bar bill was, how much our average meal cost, and much more. This post is all about taking a close look at these facts and figures, which shed light on what this trip was like for us.
AccommodationsWe had to find and secure 500 nights of accommodation. We used all sorts of resources to do that, but it turns out that we spent roughly 40% of our time in Airbnb bookings, 40% of our time in hotels, and the remaining 20% of our time in various other accommodations ranging from tents to cruise ships. On average we spent more per night on our Airbnb bookings than we did at hotels, but we usually got more space in an Airbnb apartment. We also preferred them because we felt slightly less like a tourist being able to stay in an apartment building in a residential area of town. Also, we spent over $8,000 with Airbnb in the last two years. You’d think they would give us some kind of reward or discount for having spent that much money with them, but no, they don't give out a single perk.
Beyond apartments and hotel rooms, we also spent two weeks on a cruise, a week total in hostels where we had a bunkbed in a shared living space (we avoided these as much as possible), and one week in a homestay in Guatemala. The homestay included all our meals in addition to accommodation. We also slept in a tent for 24 nights – 18 of those nights incurred a camping fee while 6 of them were entirely without cost. We also spent a remarkable 49 nights with free lodging. In addition to the few nights of free camping, we spent 39 nights staying with friends and 4 nights of “free” accommodation as part of an overnight flight or bus ride.
What impressed me most is that we effectively only paid
$1,041 per month in "rent" for the whole trip. That’s crazy to think of when our current apartment, now that we’re back in the US, cost nearly three times that amount.
We also looked back at how long we spent at each
location. The graph below shows, as a percentage of our time, how often any
given day was part of a 1-night stay, 2-night stay, 3-night stay, and so forth.
This graph tells us that our typical stay, accounting for just over 20% of our time,
was part of a 4-night stay. You can also see our aversion to making a booking
for a 6-night stay, because there was usually a discount to be had if we booked
for a full week.
We made a total of 43 booking for 1-night stays. The only time we would choose to stay one night somewhere was if we were camping or if we needed an overnight stop on our way to somewhere else. Otherwise, a single night was way too short of a time to really spend anywhere. Of our longer stays, we spent a full 9 nights in El Cocuy (Colombia), 10 nights in Antigua (Guatemala), 12 nights in Bogota (Colombia), and 14 nights on our transatlantic cruise. Our stay in El Cocuy was extended so we could recover from our strenuous high altitude hike up to Laguna Grande, while our time in Antigua was the very first accommodation of our trip and where we attended our first week of Spanish language classes. We extended our time in Bogota to 12 days because we were enjoying it so much, and our 14-night transatlantic cruise was the longest time we spent anywhere on this trip without having to repack our bags.
We also know where we spent the most and least on our housing. Outside of nominal camp site fees, our cheapest hotels were in Koh Muk (Thailand), Yangshuo (China), and Lijiang (China), where our nightly bills came to $8.76, $10.58, and $13.32, respectively. What a deal, right? Our Koh Muk hotel was pretty basic and required some sense of adventure – a super basic room with a shared bathroom with plenty of bugs to try and avoid, but we were on the tiniest little island in a tropical paradise, which made it hard to complain. Our hotel in Yangshuo was definitely the best steal of our trip. It was a modern hotel, by all standards, with a king bed and a western-style toilet. Funny story from that room was that the hotel staff tried to give us a room with a squat toilet, which we didn’t want, so we tried to ask for a room with a western toilet, which we couldn’t figure out how to translate until they showed us a smartphone translation which showed up as “stink pot.” Yes, we would very much like a room with a stink pot, please. And our hotel in Lijiang was also reasonably nice, minus the glass window right in front of the toilet. But in total, we stayed at 25 accommodations that were all $20 or less a night for the two of us.
On the other end of the list were our most expensive hotels. We were of course trying to avoid expensive hotels, but sometimes there was no way around it. Our most expensive hotels were in Santiago, Vienna, and Hong Kong which came to nightly costs of $79.92, $75.87, and $74.82. Ouch. We had one overnight stop in Santiago on our way from Peru to New Zealand and all the hotels around the airport were expensive. We simply chose one that that also included a free shuttle ride. We knew Vienna was expensive, so no surprises there on the cost of our Airbnb apartment. The most painful was Hong Kong, where we had to spend a full week waiting for our Chinese visas to be processed. $75 a night was really the best we could find for someplace that we felt comfortable in for a week. It smelled of mold, but it had a nice view and I loved being in Hong Kong.
Transportation
Transportation was our second highest expense of the trip
(although nearly tied with our restaurant expenses). An itemized bill of our
transportation purchases is below. We certainly spent the most on flights,
which makes sense, even though we cashed in a lot of frequent flier miles. 145,000
miles from United and 120,000 miles from American Airlines were used to book our
two international long-haul flights (Chile to New Zealand and Japan to Georgia),
so we only had to cover the fees. We took 10 short-haul domestic flights, but
they were usually quite affordable on various budget airlines. We also took 18
international short-haul flights, also most often on budget airlines, but we
did use miles for a few of these as well. Of the low-cost carriers, my favorite
was Wizz Air. Despite the name, which does not inspire much confidence, their
fares were low and their fees were slightly more in check than other airlines, and
the seats were far roomier than most which made getting around Europe less of a
hassle.
We spent a nearly equal amount of money on buses and trains, and most often these trips were domestic to get from one city to another or around the same city. Our buses also included other shared forms of transportation, like taking marshrutkas around Georgia and even a milk truck in Colombia. Most of our international trains were around Europe while most of our domestic train trips were in China on their super-efficient high-speed rail network.
We rented a car on a few occasions, which was always a bit pricey once we added in the cost of gas and parking and other fees. The first time was in New Zealand and the second was in Czechia. We also needed a car to get back home after disembarking the cruise at Port Everglades.
There were also numerous taxi rides using all sorts of ride sharing apps from around the world, as well as many tuk tuk rides around southeast Asia. We spent lots of time on subways and metro lines to hop around cities big and small. Most of our ferry rides were for island hopping around Thailand and Malaysia, but there were also a few boat rides in Shanghai, Sydney, and Croatia, among other places.
Restaurants
We ate out all the time on this trip and settled over 700
individual restaurant bills. A histogram of all our restaurant expenses is
below. We both had a good laugh when we realized that our most expensive restaurant
bill was at Chili’s. Yes, the regular Chili’s that you find in the US, but
this one was in Singapore where we each got an entrée and a beer. Our total
came to $61.65. We were out with our friend Sharon, who lives in
Singapore for work, and we opted for something that reminded us all of home. We
didn’t realize at the time that we were eating our most expensive meal of the
whole trip, but we had a good time. (The histogram does show a bill of $71 from
when we were in Australia, but we were paying for more than just ourselves, so
we’re not really counting that here.)
Outside of Chili’s, we did have a handful of meals in the $40-50 range. These were almost all from when we were in expensive locations like Australia, Germany, Shanghai, and Vienna.
We rarely spent over $30 on a meal, but our cheapest meal is hard to determine because we had a lot of small bills of less than $2 when picking up quick breakfasts like coffee and pastries. Other fast-food type purchases were also inexpensive, which we often relied on during travel days. A quick snack at a train station or airport might only set us back a dollar or two. We could reliably find a quick breakfast or lunch snack for under $3 in places like Thailand, Malaysia, or rural parts of South America. For $6 we could buy lunch in many of the places that we traveled to, particularly in China, Czechia, and Georgia. $8-9 would start to buy a full dinner in Thailand, Peru, China, or Colombia. Prices went up from there based on location, the quality of the establishment, and if we also ordered a drink or not. Most of our meals were under $20 for the two of us.
Drinks
We end this by asking ourselves a simple question, where did we drink too much? Of course, this category also includes non-alcoholic drinks, like coffee, which we were always on the lookout for. Our most expensive individual bar bills were not at all surprising. They did not arise from drinking too much, simply from the fact that the drinks cost so much. Our highest individual bills were from the cruise (no surprise there…) followed by outings in Tianjin, Tokyo, Kyoto, Canberra, and Sydney. These were all expensive places where our bill was $50 or more for one night out.
Our least expensive beverages were all non-alcoholic, and mostly included coffee or water. But our cheapest beers were found in China and Malaysia, where $0.50 – 0.75 was enough to pick up a beer from a convenience store.
Our daily spending was lowest in places like Italy, Georgia, Poland, Sweden, and Montenegro. Some of this makes sense to us – like in Italy, where we didn’t go out that often, so we didn’t drink much. But we did drink quite a bit in Georgia, but it was always a bottle of Georgian wine with dinner that got wrapped up into our restaurant bill. So while we enjoyed plenty of Georgian wine, we rarely went out to a bar. The same is also the case for Czechia, where anytime we sat down for lunch or dinner, they just assumed we, like everyone else, were having a beer or two.
Perhaps the real measure for how often we drank was our average number of daily transactions. We averaged 2.6, 2.3, and 2.2 transactions per day in Malaysia, Thailand, and Bali. Suspicious that these are all beach destinations! Each of these transactions averaged only $5-7, but that was plenty to buy a couple beers or a bottle of wine. Truth be told, that was our main evening entertainment – after dinner we would find a beach bar to hang out at, or we would walk down to the water with a couple beers from a convenience store and our beach mat to sit and watch the sunset.
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