How to Budget for a Vacation

Nights and days are different numbers

You book nights. You eat on days. And there's nearly always one more day than nights — you eat on the day you arrive and the day you leave.

Use one figure for both and you understate food and activities by about an eighth. Small enough not to notice while planning; large enough to notice at the end.

That's why this calculator asks for both.

The arithmetic

Seven nights, eight days, two people:

Accommodation	$150 × 7 nights = $1,050
Food	$60 × 2 people × 8 days = $960
Activities	$40 × 2 × 8 = $640
Transport	$800
Total	$3,450 — $1,725 each

Had I used 7 for the days as well, food and activities would have come to $1,400 instead of $1,600. $200 missing, from one quiet assumption.

Why there are no suggested prices

Every input starts at a figure you're meant to replace.

A built-in "typical" meal cost would be confidently wrong for almost everyone — food, accommodation and activities vary by an order of magnitude between destinations and travel styles. Worse, a plausible default anchors you: it feels researched, so you adjust from it rather than finding out.

Look up two or three real prices for where you're actually going. It takes ten minutes and it's the only part of this that determines whether the number means anything.

The most useful output isn't the total

It's "each extra day would cost" — $350 here.

That's the real marginal price of staying longer: one more night, plus a day of food and activities for everyone. It excludes the transport you've already committed to, which is why it's usually much lower than people expect.

If you're deciding between seven nights and nine, that's the number the decision actually turns on — not the total.

What isn't in the total

The long tail, and it's substantial:

• Travel insurance
• Visas, entry fees, vaccinations
• Airport parking, or the taxi to it
• Luggage fees — often more on the return leg
• Transfers at both ends
• Tips, where they're expected
• Currency conversion and foreign transaction charges
• Phone roaming or a local SIM
• Pet care, plant watering, someone checking the house

Each is individually small enough to forget. Collectively they're frequently the difference between a budget that held and one that didn't.

Where overruns actually come from

Two places, reliably.

Food, because eating out three times a day costs more than people plan for — and self-catering intentions tend to collapse by day three.

Activities, because the good ones are rarely the free ones, and you'll say yes to things.

Add a real contingency line for both, and don't spend it in the first three days.

Two structural things worth checking

Is accommodation per room or per person? The calculator assumes per room or rental, which is right for a hotel or an Airbnb and wrong for anything charged per head. Multiply before entering if yours is.

Transport is one total rather than per person, because it genuinely goes both ways — flights scale with people, a tank of fuel or a hire car doesn't. Add up what will actually be spent getting there and back.

Settle the money before you leave

The per-person figure isn't really a maths problem. It's a social one.

Agreeing who pays for what at the kitchen table costs nothing. Working it out on day five, when one person has covered two dinners and another booked the car, is how a trip develops an atmosphere that outlasts it.

Print the trip budget worksheet — the second checklist is the one that catches the costs nobody remembers.