How much is that dream vacation going to cost?

 

If you have been following along on the blog, then you will have already taken several steps in planning your dream vacation. First, you selected your location. Next, you bought a couple of travel guides and have read through them, marking the locations that you are interested in going to see. Then, you scoured the internet looking for other blogs and website recommendations on places to go, things to see, and places to eat. By now, you should have compiled a pretty long list of all the things that you might like to do while traveling on that dream vacation.

Now comes the big question: How much is it going to cost? This is the part that scares most people when planning an adventure of any size. My view is to over budget and you’ll never be sad to come home with extra funds, upgrade a few items, or be able to splurge on something that you wouldn’t normally spend money on while on vacation.

I start by trying to figure out what the big, key items for the trip will be. For instance, on the Italy trip, I knew that I wanted to visit Rome, Florence, and Venice. I also knew from my internet sleuthing and travel guides that it would be easy to take a day trip to Pompeii & the Amalfi Coast from Rome and to go to Siena & Pisa was also a day trip from Florence. I knew of the major features that I wanted to see in Rome: the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Pantheon. I knew the key places in Florence: Perseus’ statue, Santa Maria Novella Pharmacy, the Duomo, the David & Accademia Gallery, and a cooking class.  For Venice, I wanted to see the Rialto Bridge, the “lace island”, Doge’s Palace, and St. Mark’s Basilica.

 The next stop was to decide whether it was worth the cost to do an early entrance ticket, a private tour, or see it with the masses. So, I created a spreadsheet and put each city on a different tab. On the city’s tab, I did a column of each place that I wanted to go to. In the next column, I listed the address. The next column held the web address for the location of where I could get tickets or more information about the item. For items that are plazas or fountains, I put the Wikipedia page so I could go back and read detail information. In the last column, I put how much the venue costs were slated to be.

Next up was the transportation piece. For the Italy trip, we had decided to fly to Rome, travel by train to Florence then Venice, and then fly home from Venice. We decided not to worry about renting a car while in Rome and would rely on other modes of transportation while in each of the cities. For a preliminary cost on flights, I used Kayak.com and placed my travel dates for the 15 days that we had planned to be gone. I used the main Italian websites to look up the cost of the train tickets, bus passes, and water taxis. 

Last up is hotels, bed & breakfasts, hostels, villas, and private residences. This is the hardest part for me when telling others how they need to plan. I tend to go for hotels due to amenities. Using a variety of websites, I would search for 3-star and above, at minimum. Based on the research that I had done, I knew we would be doing 7 days in Rome, 5 days in Florence, and 3 in Venice. I searched and marked down 4-5 locations in each city that I felt would be a good fit.

This gives the base amount for the finances needed for the trip, but doesn’t include food, souvenirs, and incidentals. For food, all the locations that I had looked at staying at included breakfast, so I needed to be concerned lunch, dinner, and snacks. Going back to the research of places to eat, many restaurants have their menus online, so it’s easier to look up prices. I add 35% to the prices since the menus could be out of date. I’m not much for souvenirs, so I do not allocate more than a hundred dollars on most trips. I knew that I would be sending wine and olive oil home and buying lace, so my souvenir budget for this trip was $1000. Incidentals are tough to gauge, but I like to have $200 for this purpose. All of this goes on to the spreadsheet to give the rough budget.

This rough budget is the low end of what I recommend saving for the trip. In the next post, I’ll go over how to bring it all together for the dream trip of a lifetime.

Happy planning,

LJ