When I started thinking about this trip I thought that $15,000 for six months sounded pretty reasonable. Spoiler: I nailed it.
Step 1: an RTW ticket
The first purchase for my trip was the plane ticket. While many people are happy to buy tickets en route, I’m more of a planner – and I also had several very set dates to arrive places, and some long flights (Brazil -> London, Europe->Jakarta) that were unlikely to get cheaper if bought later, and could be harder to find seats on if left too late. I spent a couple of months playing around with itineraries at rtw.oneworld.com, checking out how taxes and fees changed if I added a side trip to Buenos Aires, or if I flew TAM Airlines Brazil->London instead of BA, etc. Different airlines and airports have very different levels of fees and taxes, so there’s a lot of possible optimizing at this point – it is well worth spending some time reading the forums at Flyertalk to pick up some tips. The biggest trick here was that the ticket base price varies by the country your first flight departs from – so I saved a bunch of money by planning to fly on award miles Seattle->Melbourne and then start my RTW ticket in Australia. My first itineraries were pricing out at ~USD$5500, and my final booking was US$4000 (I also benefited from a convenient collapse in the Australian dollar the week before I booked!) This ticket didn’t cover every leg of my trip – besides using airline miles to get my return ticket to Australia and fly within it (total fees of ~$170) I planned to pay cash for the short flights within continents (eg Lima-Cusco, London-Geneva, Ireland-Paris, Jakarta-Singapore) and one flight to Tahiti that wasn’t covered by anyone on my RTW alliance. This also gave me more flexibility for the short trips that didn’t really need to be locked in so far ahead, and meant that I could consider these trips as part of my per-continent budget.
Final RTW ticket routing:
Melbourne-Auckland, Tahiti-Easter Island-Santiago-Lima-Rio de Janeiro-London, Istanbul-Jakarta, Hong Kong-Melbourne.
During the trip I had to change the date of the Istanbul->Jakarta flight, for a $125 fee (my own fault for booking it the wrong month) but there were no available flights around the date I wanted so for no extra charge they booked me London-Jakarta instead, which suited me even better.
Initial travel budget:
| RTW ticket | $4000 |
| Seattle-Melbourne return | $100 fees |
| Melbourne-Brisbane return | $70 fees |
| Auckland-Tahiti (no OneWorld airlines cover this) | $400 |
| BASE TRAVEL | $4570 |
Step 2: break up the trip into estimatable chunks
If your budget is going to significantly define where and how long you can travel, obviously you’ll need to do this part before pulling the trigger on the RTW ticket above.
I drew up a per continent budget, using pretty broad strokes. For Australia and London costs were less predictable since I was staying with family, and I kind of just guessed. For the rest of the time, I looked up a half dozen or so sites using search terms like backpacking cost per day and tried to find sensible looking overall numbers for the continent, or where that varied too much for a specific country, then calculated an expected daily average of food and accommodation spending and multiplied by days in the area. If there were any major activities for the location I added them in (eg: Spanish lessons in Chile, Macchu Picchu fees in Peru), then put in a buffer for catching buses, getting coffee, shopping, etc.
In some places I already knew a lot of the travel within continents that I planned to do, so to estimate these expenses I looked up what my intended flights/trains would cost if I were booking them about four weeks ahead, and listed those costs in my budget. For others I made quite detailed hypothetical plans in order to calculate potential travel costs, most of which I ended up not following in the slightest (especially in Asia, since it was so far away when I was planning) but which still turned out to be a pretty accurate guide to how much I spent. For example, I priced out a train from Singapore to Chiang Mai, boat to Laos, flight to Hanoi, then train to Hong Kong, and I ended up going to almost none of those places. For me this kind of detailed hypothetical trip planning is almost as much fun as actually travelling, but YMMV – just be aware that there can be value in the exercise even if you don’t want to commit to a set path.
Planned and actual budgets per continent:
| Australia | Actual spending |
| $600? | $770 |
| Oceania (15 days) | Actual spending |
| Transport ($100) | 30 ferry |
| Accom (15*40 = $600) | 100 + 180 + 305 = 585 |
| food (15*20 = $300) | 100 + 65 + 118 = 283 |
| Activities ? | 120 + 107 + 125 = 352 |
| $1000 total | 30 + 585 + 283 + 352 = 1,250 |
| South America (31 days) | Actual spending | ||||
| Budgeted costs | Chile | Argentina | Peru | Brazil | total |
| Food ($500) | 70 | 75 | 150 | 70 | 365 |
| Accom ($1000) | 500 | 85 | 225 | 40 | 850 |
| Travel ($600) | – | 115 | 460 | – | 575 |
| Other ($900) | 700 | 112 | 250 | 110 | 1170 |
| $3000 total | 1270 | 390 | 1090 | 220 | 2960 |
| Europe 60 days | Actual spending |
| Travel ($1500) | $1400 (London<->NYC, London<->France, London-Dublin-Paris-Geneva-Barcelona-Dublin-London) |
| Accom ($1000+) | $1345 (30 nights paid, remainder staying with family) |
| Food (60@$25 = $1500) | $850? $300 in London, 200 San Sebastian, cash spending |
| Other ($500) | ~$1100 (probably includes some more food) |
| $4500 total | $4670 |
| South East Asia 30 days | Actual spending |
| Travel ($300) | $280 |
| Accom ($300 ) | $705: $595 cc + $25 HK + $85 thailand |
| Food ($300) | $535: $130 + $180 cash HK + $45 cash Thailand + $155 sg + $25 jakarta |
| Other ($600) | $300: $138 cash in HK + 40 thailand + 100 SG + 20 jakarta |
| $1500 total | $1820 |
Step 3: track spending during the trip
As I travelled, I had my budget plans (basically the ‘budget’ column of the tables above) easily accessible in OneNote on my phone, and I tracked everything I spent in a notepad app stored locally on my phone (especially important in places like Tahiti with no internet access!) This allowed me to check if I was tracking against my expected averages or if I had unexpected room from one budget pool. When I had internet, I also entered rough bulk transactions into Mint so I could use their tagging system for my overall budget – Mint was particularly handy in Europe where more of my spending was on cards and some of my travel/hotel costs were split with Nick, so I could just pull up everything tagged ‘Nick’ to calculate the total to split.
Through South America I was pretty good about tracking everything, and it was easy to include budget considerations in my plans since I was only making decisions for myself. Once in London I got pretty slack, since it didn’t feel like ‘travel’ so much just buying coffee and groceries – fortunately that was predominantly card purchases so Mint was tracking it for me anyway. I realized that when I was with other people, budget felt like less of an important factor, although it’s hard to pinpoint why – perhaps just the extra social pressure of ‘let’s get coffee!’ is enough to overwhelm the mental calculations? Fortunately Nick was also travelling with a budget in mind so we were on the same wavelength in general.
Arriving in Jakarta was a bit of a price shock from London, in a good way but it made me far less careful with my spending! I also didn’t track my spending terribly well in Jakarta and Singapore, so those figures are slightly rough (guessing at the categories I spent all my ATM withdrawals on). However in general my budget was working out pretty nicely until I had trouble finding accommodation for the Saturday night in Hong Kong, and ended up spending a ton ($280!) on a nice hotel because I didn’t realise soon enough that it would actually be hard to get a place (PS Airbnb is useless for last-minute bookings).
Step 4: post-trip check
After my trip, I spent some time figuring out how well my budget estimates had gone. I realized that I’d forgotten to count my startup costs – new backpack, travel insurance – and fixed expenses – ~$150/month for my phone and my storage locker in Seattle – which added about $1200 to the trip, and I hadn’t budgeted anything for the last few weeks I spent in Australia, where I spent maybe another $500. I had otherwise gone over my planned spending by about $800 by the time I got back to Australia, so my door-to-door spending from March 30, departing Seattle to October 14, arriving in Seattle was just under $17,500 which compares reasonably well to my original out-of-thin-air number of $15,000! Then I had to start paying rent again, and went out to restaurants and coffee shops pretty continuously until I started work in December, so I spent a few thousand more on regular expenses before I got my first paycheck on December 31. It’s pretty important to have savings for that stretch between getting back and getting paid again.
Caveats
One important note if you’re looking at my budget to help plan your own trip, is that I saved a bunch of money using airline miles and hotel points built up with credit card bonuses, and by staying with friends and family as I travelled – while airline miles can be collected relatively easily by any American willing to put in the effort, it’s a lot harder to carefully plant friends and family all over the world, so you may not be able to rely on that :p
A little more specifically, my spending for London and Melbourne is ridiculously low for any comparison purpose since I was mostly just hanging out with friends and family. In London, since my sister had literally just given birth, we pretty much stayed in the house poking the baby for fun and occasionally getting coffee or groceries nearby. If you go there in order to be in London you will spend a lot more money on both accommodation and actually doing things. My sister thinks I should add for complete disclosure that I don’t buy clothes etc. Ever. So that wasn’t a budget challenge for me.
In total I benefited from 101 nights of free accommodation, primarily in some of the most expensive cities I visited (London, New York, Geneva, Melbourne), of which 5 were paid for with credit card miles and the rest were staying with family. This means I only spent 95 nights in paid accommodation, including three nights of just camping fees and 12 nights shared with Nick (and Hannah and Finley).
Speaking of accommodation, one of my biggest wins was that I could sublet my apartment to friends while I was travelling. This only worked because I’d been in the same apartment for several years and had a great relationship with the management company – if they hadn’t agreed to this, my lease was up the day I was leaving so I would have let it go and looked for a new place when I arrived back. After a few friends-of-friends fell through I finally mentioned it to the right guy, my boyfriend’s co-worker, about five weeks before I left (they were looking for a place in my neighbourhood and jumped at a six-month furnished setup!). I rented it out at cost and they paid me back for rent+bills each month, it worked perfectly.
Credit card cashback: Barclays $800, Charles Schwab ATM refunds ~$150 (valuable for convenience!), REI visa cashback $100 (on my new backpack for the trip).
Airline miles value:
- Alaska $1800 return to Australia (I include the extra value of the last minute booking, but not the bonus value of business class since I wouldn’t have paid for it)
- Qantas $200
- flights to New York $500 from London, $300 from Seattle
Hotel points value: estimated $500 (Lima, New York * 2, Dublin, Hong Kong)
Interested?
- The Alaska credit card can be applied for about every three months, and they don’t mind you having more than one. Each time you open one you get 25,000 miles, and there is almost always a promotional offer running that gives you $100 credit after you spend $1000, which pays for the annual fee – then you cancel it before the second year. A flight from Seattle to Melbourne costs ~60,000 miles.
- The Barclays Arrival Plus gives you a $400 travel credit after spending $3000 in the first three months.
- The Charles Schwab savings account refunds all ATM fees, worldwide.