The cost of your round the world trip

I'd be interested to know if the cost of your round the world trip/long term travelling cost were more than you expected or less than you had thought.
Ours came out about what I expected.
Jean

My budget was excellent, however I overestimated timeframes, so came home most of a month early, with some extra money in the bank. I had scheduled 6 months for our trip, and we finished the route as planned in closer to five - I think largely because eastern Europe proved quite tiring, and we maybe didn't give it its due.

My trip was cheaper than another semester of university, so all the more reason to head off! Specifically, it came out to ~$17k for 6.5 months, not counting a cruise my parents decided to go on during that time and I was invited to join (because not like I would have joined that cruise on my own!).

I realize that this is actually on the expensive side for the timeframe in question, but nearly half that time was Europe which is not the way to go if you want cheap, or at least that was the case a year ago. Second, my limitation was time and not budget so I would shell out for big ticket items like scuba diving and bungy jumping I might have thought twice about otherwise.

I am over-budget as Greenland & the bit of western Europe came in quite a bit more than expected, however after that just about right on. During my 2 months in Bangkok living like a local I saved nearly the cost of the TEFL course so that period still came in on budget.

i think the biggest variable that i had not considered was costs associated to nationality, for example i had planned to travel overland through some countries - which refused to issue a visa or required that i travel back to my country to get that visa. in other cases i flew to some countries, where i didn't require a visa but refused entry. In two cases 2 two airlines simply refused to fly me through Europe even though i was in transit and had already paid for my tickets. And in one case application for visas requires that you have a confirmed ticket prior to reservation - had a ticket and visa was turned down and couldn't get a refund. And in one case had to forego travelling to one country even though had a ticket but because airlines had not updated there rule book and the country in question didn't have a local embassy.

All this inconveniences ended up doubling my costs, but i was prepared for those possibilites - hopefully someday i will write a RTW travel guide for non eu,non us,canada and australian national.

And then came Australia with it's insane prices & being held hostage by Qantas who wouldn't honor my One World RTW segment SYD-HNL until a month after I wanted to travel so I had to reroute at a cost of over $1000

My bf and I are planning for our RTW now, hoping to save up $15-20k each to travel a year in South America, India, and Asia. Does that sound reasonable? It'd be great if we had money leftover to hit Australia and/or New Zealand, but not sure if that will happen...

For 7 months in Europe, we budgeted about $10k each (making a daily budget of $30-40 each.) We feel like this worked out well. While we were cautious of our spending, we don't feel like we missed out on any authentic experiences. Of course, it would've been nice to have had more money to work with... but isn't that always the case?

C-and-C, that is pretty accurate. My wife and I went on a year long RTW from Oct. 08 to Oct. 09, and we spent about 5.5 months in S. America, 5 weeks in New Zealand, 3.5 months in SE Asia, and 6 weeks in India.

We spent right around $40k (give or take a bit, still haven't crunched the final numbers). We stayed in private rooms with private baths the vast majority of the time (probably about 95%), we ate pretty cheaply most of the time (lots of markets and street food, which was not a sacrifice for us), but we did go out to dinner a lot. We love to eat, so we rarely skipped meals like we saw many other travelers doing. We like to drink, so we didn't really skimp on the beer, and we pretty much did what we wanted as far as activities. We also traveled overland most of the time, trying to only fly when necessary or when we found a good deal. Hope this helps!

My last trip was 15 months in 2006-07. 8 months were in Aus/NZ where I budgeted for $2K/month USD($67/day), and 7 months were in SE Asia/Nepal, where I budgeted for $1K/month ($33/day).
I made my Aus/NZ budget right on if you subtract the one internal flight, and the round trip to NZ. SE Asia was no problem on my budget. Remember that alcohol is the big budget buster on any trip where a hostel is your main accommodation. Also eating western food in SE Asia can up your spending also. Me and my gf are heading to Latin America in Sept for a year+, and our working budget is $1200USD/month ($40/day) each, NOT including separate funds for Antarctica and Galapagos cruises. I think that should be adequate.

It's incredibly helpful to hear everyone's budgets, specifically the daily breakdowns, to get an idea of what's feasible.

Seabass, thanks for providing details of your RTW - your traveling style is exactly like my boyfriend's and mine so it's a nice reassurance as we plan. Thanks to Flackattack as well - like you, we're budgeting about $40/day for Latin America. We head out in October... can't wait to get on the road. Happy travels!

No problem at all. That was one of the things that I found frustrating and stressful when planning ours. We just had a tough time finding specific numbers of what others spent, and when we did, we never knew how accurate they would be to our style of traveling.

I know when we left and for the first month I was obsessed with budget and staying on ours. We obviously had no clue if our budget was going to be accurate or not, if we were going to be back in 6 months instead of 12 because we blew through our budget. It sounds like you two will be just fine.

Have a blast and enjoy. It was the best experience of my life. Just be prepared to never be the same again (in a good way).

$67/day in OZ must have been dorm room, cooking at the hostel, absolutely no alcohol & travel by hitch hiking'

Cost me 6k for 33 days + $1000 to Qantas to get out of the country as they claimed there was no plane seats for a month on my RTW ticket from One World!

It was definitely dorm rooms in hostels. About half my dinners were in the hostels. Alcohol I tried to keep down to twice a week, with some success-usually bought from the grocery store and downed before I went out. You know, getting my pre-buzz going. Alcohol is definitely the budget buster. I took an organized tour on the west coast, and another one up the middle from Melbourne to Darwin. I used needaride.com/au to get from Perth to Adelaide via Albany/Kalgoorlie/the Nullabor/and the Eyre Peninsula (every other tank of gas was mine to buy). Rode the Greyhound down the East coast from Cairns to Sydney after a flight from Adelaide.
Also I spent 9 days at three different helpexchange.net volunteer situations-work 4 hours in exchange for room and board and meeting/hanging with locals. One of whom I met through BNA :-}

I did 11 months from Asia, Australia, and South America. Spending in total US$19,568. That brings it to about US$60/day. To me that was more than expected. I didn't realize how expensive Australia was going to be. And the flight from Sydney to Buenos Aires was a big hit on the wallet.

I wrote everything about it here: http://www.artofbackpacking.com/cost-su ... months-rtw

Hey Skylab — thanks for that post!

This week, on our blog, we took a quick look at the per day costs for a sample of travel bloggers who’ve gone on record and shared their per-day costs — including Michael (Skylab).

One day soon, we’ll increase the sample size and take a more methodical approach—but for those in the planning stages, or those who are simply curious, here’s a few round-the-world trips by the numbers!

Check it out by clicking here.