Most people underestimate a trip's cost because they anchor on the one big-ticket item — the flight or the hotel — and mentally wave away the rest as "small stuff." In reality, food, local transport and activities for two people over a week routinely add up to more than the flight did. This calculator forces every category onto the table individually: flights, accommodation, food, local transport, activities and a miscellaneous buffer, so nothing quietly gets left out of the plan.
Accommodation and food scale with the number of nights and the number of travellers respectively, which the tool handles automatically — you enter a nightly hotel rate and a per-person daily food figure, and it multiplies them out across your actual trip length and group size rather than making you do that arithmetic by hand.
Accommodation cost depends enormously on destination and season, but a reasonable way to estimate it is to check two or three real listings for your travel dates and take the middle figure, rather than the cheapest one you can find, since availability at rock-bottom prices tends to disappear as your dates get closer. For food, budget travellers eating mostly local street food or self-catering can often get by on a modest daily figure, while travellers who plan to eat at sit-down restaurants for every meal should roughly double it. Local transport varies by city — a place with a good metro system will cost far less per day than one where taxis or ride-hailing are the only practical option.
Even a careful budget misses things: a souvenir bought on impulse, a taxi taken because it started raining, a museum entry fee that turned out to be higher than expected, a SIM card, tips. Building in a percentage buffer on top of the planned categories — typically somewhere between 10% and 20% depending on how tightly you expect to stick to a plan — means these normal surprises don't blow the budget, because they were already accounted for.
Once you have a total, it's worth splitting it across the number of days in the trip to get a rough daily spend target, which is a far easier number to track while travelling than a single lump total. If you're travelling with others, run the total through the Trip Cost Splitter once real costs come in, to divide shared expenses fairly even when people paid for different things along the way. And if the trip spans a country with a different currency, the Currency Converter turns this budget into local-currency terms so daily prices feel less abstract once you land.
A last point worth flagging: exchange rate movements between the time you build this budget and the time you actually travel can shift your real costs meaningfully on international trips, particularly for longer-term travel planned many months out. Revisit the budget with the Currency Converter closer to departure if your trip is still some way off.
Enter the total for all travellers combined in the flights field, since flight prices don't usually scale in a simple per-person multiple the way food or activities do.
10% suits a trip where you already have most costs pinned down and expect few surprises; 15–20% is safer for a first-time destination or a longer trip where plans may change.
Not by default, since those are one-off costs rather than daily ones. Add them to the flights field as a lump sum, or check the Visa Checklist Generator and Travel Insurance Comparator tools for those costs specifically.
Yes — use blended average figures for accommodation and food across all the cities, or run the calculator once per city and add the totals for a more precise result.