Dollars & Data
Dollars and Data
(That's date-er, not dart-er)
We would quite often get asked questions about both the accommodations and the financials of the trip:
How can you afford it?
Where will you stay?
Have you made a budget?
What kind of places did you stay?
How much do you think it will cost?
Truth be told, there was no budget, but in my head, I'd plucked out a figure that I guessed the year might cost: AUD $100,000.
It turns out that wasn't a bad guess.
Of course, it actually costs a lot more than this because Kate and I didn't work for a year and there was the mortgage to pay - this is only focusing on the direct costs of travelling.
I decided to keep a record of a few things as we went along
1. Accommodation Scoring (which included costs)
2. Expenses
Accommodation Scoring (incl Cost)
We started a system of scoring every place we stayed at, and developed 5 categories
1. Bedroom
2. Bathroom
3. Amenities
4. Location
5. Price
Each was scored out of 20, giving a total out of 100.
In the end we stayed at 113 places, and that doesn't include friends' and families' houses (which was a further 10 places).
There are grey areas - like scoring the overnight trains and ferry but not scoring any over night flights but so be it.
Scores ranged from 48 (Hvoll Hostel in Iceland) to 84.5 (Didini Divori, Croatia and Onederz, Cambodia) but most hovered around 70, with an average of 73 for the year.
However each time we scored some new places and compared to old places, we'd always question why we'd given some certain scores so there was occasional retrospective alterations.
Is the list useful for anyone else? Only really as a guide; scoring was all relative to the types of places we stayed at, and if you were on a two week holiday where every night is more cherished than our 341 nights, what's important changes.
We were fortunate not to have any stinkers - none that we opened the bedroom door and then demanded to leave. We also had no troubles with phantom hotels; every homestay / hostel / motel / hotel was expecting us. And we never had any security issues either - we didn't bother locking stuff in a safe; not that most places had a safe anyway.
Average Scores by Country and Price per night in $AUD
71.0 Thailand $71/night or 1,557baht (13 places, 32 nights)
74.3 Vietnam $74/night or 1,179VND (20 places, 46 nights). Vietnam numbers are heavily influenced by the 2 night cruise. If you remove those 2 nights it was $54/night or 880VND for the remaining 44 nights.
70.8 America $221/night or USD$142 (23 places, 45 nights)
63.4 Iceland $237/night or ISK21,557 (4 places, 6 nights)
66.3 UK $236/night or GBP121 (2 places, 2 nights)
72.1 France $149/night or 91euro (4 places, 12 nights)
77.0 Germany $155/night or 94euro (2 places, 3 nights)
78.0 Slovenia $147/night or 89euro (1 place, 2 nights)
77.1 Croatia $140/night or 85euro (7 places, 19 nights)
69.5 Italy $175/night or 106euro (7 places, 16 nights)
75.3 Spain $171/night or 104euro (2 places, 4 nights)
76.8 Greece $136/night or 82euro (8 places, 12 nights)
77.5 Cambodia $149/night or 91euro (10 places, 30 nights)
NB. The count of nights or places doesn't include the friends and family stays.
Total Accommodation Bill: $29,850
Travel
One of the big costs was always going to be the flights. We left Sydney having booked our first flight to Bangkok, and a month later our flight out of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Apart from those two, we booked flights as went.
A straight trip there and back to the UK, I'd expect be $8,000 - $10,000 for 4 tickets, that was my only benchmark.
In the end we spent $14,200.
Some airlines were no frills (the first thing Sienna and Seb wanted to know for each flight was whether the plane would have TVs in the back of the seats) which meant paying for luggage, others full service.
That was 9 flights which flew a tad over 50,500km (the circumference of the globe is about 40,000km).
$1,500 Sydney to Bangkok (via Singapore)
$1,350 Chiang Mai to Ho Chi Minh
$3,000 Hanoi to Los Angeles (via Taipei)
$2,650 Baltimore to Reykjavik
$ 750 Reykjavik to London
$ 400 Bordeaux to Athens
$2,700 Athens to Siem Reap (via Singapore)
$ 500 Phnom Penh to Bangkok
$1,400 Bangkok to Sydney (via Xiamen)
$14,200 is a chunk of money, but given we were only ever booking one way flights and considering it was 9 flights, I think that was pretty good.
If we travelled 50,500km on planes, how about cars, trains and buses?
2,400km on trains - 900km in Thailand, 1,050km in Vietnam and 450km on Eurostar for London to Paris.
2,600km on buses - perhaps less than I thought, perhaps because you lived through each km a little more...
23,100km in cars - whilst the hire cars are known, the driving in the UK is more of a guest-imate.
8,050km in our cross-country USA Tesla
450km for our Annapolis (USA) car hire
1,300km along the south coast of Iceland
4,700km is my guess for UK
7,150km for Europe
1,450km around mainland Greece
Put it all together, and throw in lots of taxis and tuk tuks and we're nudging 80,000km, or twice around the world.
Cost wise, bus and train tickets plus car hire, fuels/charging and tolls comes to a suspiciously similar number as the flights of $14,200.
Total Travel Bill: $28,400
Boring Bills
Visas $670 (Vietnam $320, USA $130, Cambodia $220)
Insurance $3,050 (this was actually just less than our private health insurance in Sydney which we were able to pause for the year)
Total Insurance & Visas $3,720
Expenses
This was a broad bucket covering everything from laundry to gifts and souvenirs to medicines to new clothing.
The souvenirs element was always going to be lower than normal because anything we bought had to be carried for the next x months. Plus the bags were pretty full when we left Sydney to start with.
Total Expenses: $1,800
UK
The tracking fell off the rails in the UK somewhat and would have been so lumpy (in terms of paying for some things but not others), that it wouldn't be much use as a data point anyway.
It's a mix of the comments made in Accommodation and Food - we were so well looked after by friends and family.
Here then I simply looked at our credit card and then added a 25% buffer for any other cards we might have used to pay as we went along. It's a bit unsatisfactory but there you go. It's also not relevant for anyone else travelling to the UK as tourists.
Total UK (guess): $8,800
Food
South East Asia was unsurprisingly the least expensive for food, which was as well because most accommodation had no way to cook for yourself which meant we were eating out or having takeaway 3 meals a day.
Elsewhere, similar to the accommodation we were very fortunate to have friends and family that when we stayed with them, food had been brought in for us. Whilst we might have tried to do some shopping for them or take them out for meals, we definitely experienced and benefited from their kindness.
In USA and Europe we might eat out once a day, but otherwise it was cereal for breakfast (an advantage of car hire meaning we could drop food in cool bags and take from one place to the next), homemade sandwiches or wraps for lunch and then perhaps dinner out.
Anyone who knows us knows we're not big foodies, that's not to say we see eating as simply a means to end, but we're happy with simple foods, and we're also trying to balance what the kids want with our wants.
$29/day Thailand & Vietnam
$71/day USA (despite 24 of our 69 days at friends houses)
$42/day Iceland (much lower than any normal tourist - in six days we ate out once, and that was takeaway hotdogs)
$45-60/day Europe
$41/day Cambodia
Total Food: $12,450
(this doesn't include 2.5 months in the UK where we stopped keeping tabs. So it works out to about $50 a day)
Activities
This is all your entrance fees for museums, parks, tours and the like.
Picking and choosing which to do was tricky mostly due to trying to find a balance for adults and children. Sistene Chapel in Rome for example, that was a pass after making the kids see the Pope, and knowing Seb would much rather watch a football game instead.
Total Activities: $5,950
Summary
$29,850 - Accommodation
$14,200 - Flights
$14,200 - Cars, Trains, Buses, Ferries
$ 3,720 - Visas & Insurance
$ 8,800 - UK
$ 1,800 - Expenses
$12,450 - Food
$ 5,950 - Activities
$90,970
I reckon adding 10% for all the things we missed along the way isn't unreasonable, which brings us out to almost exactly $100,000.
As a single number, its undoubtedly a lot of money, but for all the places we went, things we did and saw, people we met across an 11 month period, I still reckon it's an amazing investment for a lifetime of memories.
And yet, and yet, if you get a globe and draw where we went, there's still plenty more to do on our next trip...