Sometimes I’m asked how much a trip has cost. Usually because it’s either a trip they’re interested in doing themselves, or it’s the sort of trip they’re expecting to be stupidly expensive and are curious. I have to admit some trips have cost under £1K, yet the most I’ve spent on one was over £10K. I usually find though that most two week breaks exploring a country will cost me between £2–5K by the time everything is included.

It might sound like a lot, but there’s often things we don’t really think about when planning a trip. Let’s assume you’ve got everything you need in terms of what you’ll take with you, and spending money. The costs we’re left with are things like:

• Flights,
• Accommodation,
• Tourism visa,
• Travel vaccinations,
• Departure tax,
• Organised tour costs and entry fees

As an example, let’s look at my trip to Malawi. This is an organised trip with volunteer work planned for each day, and a marathon at the end. All of the accommodation is included, as is most of the food. This gives me a starting cost of £845.

So, to get there obviously I then needed to book flights. There aren’t that many options from the UK to Malawi, and from what I could tell the most cost effective ones all seem to go through Johannesburg. Not wanting to spend too much on them, I found a balance between cost and flight length and paid £994.11. About half of that cost is in the usual taxes.

Malawi is a country where entry requires a visa of some sort — for what I’d be doing it’d need to be a tourism visa. The cost of this is £65, and is applied for at the Malawi High Commission in London. For those that don’t live in London there is obviously the cost of getting to London to drop off your passport, and then again for picking it up a few days later. From Leicester this could be around £100 per return trip by train, or around £45 in fuel cost, parking, and tube transport when driving. So for me, as I drove, it’s only another £90.

In the case of travel vaccinations, I tend to stay fairly up-to-date on them, and most are free under the NHS. The exception for this are ones such as Yellow Fever which can be another £50–60, but wasn’t needed in this case. What is needed however are anti-malarial tablets.

There are no vaccines for malaria, so these tablets are there to give you a chance should you be bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito. There are numerous types of malaria tablets, and most are relatively cheap. The best one, which is the one recommended for Malawi (as there is high resistance for the others in that region) is Malarone which costs around £1.75 per tablet. These should be taken a couple of days before travel, and then for a week after returning.

Usually there is a prescription cost added to this, but some supermarket pharmacies will allow you to book a consultation with them so that a GP prescription isn’t necessary. So what this means is that for a 7 day trip I’d need 16 tablets at a cost of around £28.

Sometimes there is a departure tax in airports and this can be anything up to US$100. It seems in the case of Malawi, or at least Lilongwe airport, the tax is included in the ticket price.

Another consideration is travel insurance, but this is something I pay for annually and so isn’t specific to a trip.

This means that for the basics, this trip is costing me £1,957.11. On top of this there is spending money needed for drinks, the one meal that isn’t included, and any souvenirs I might want to buy. This means that even for just 7 days I’d be looking at having spent an overall total of around £2.1K.

A trip to the US can cost similar, if not more, especially if you’re looking at car hire as well. There are cheaper ways to travel though. From the UK it’s possible to get very cheap flights around Europe. So let’s imagine a long weekend to Athens. I use this as an example as it’s recently come up in conversation. What could that cost?

Being a runner myself, let’s say this is for the Authentic Athens Marathon with a few days for looking around — arriving on November 9th, and leaving on November 12th. Economy flights from London are then typically £150–200 depending on the time of day and the carrier. Already this is noticeably cheaper than trips outside of Europe.

Accommodation can be very cheap, depending on where you’re willing to stay. There’s the traditional option of booking a hotel — I’d recommend avoiding lower than 3* just because quality really can vary greatly when you’re on the continent. The other option though is AirBNB — an alternative that is gaining a lot of popularity. Based on one adult, a typical hotel room could be as cheap as £130 for that time, but by going for a known chain it would be around £200. For the examples I looked at this was for a single room, but found that twin rooms were the same price or cheaper so if you’re travelling with friends or family then it’s possible to share the cost and get it even cheaper. For the sake of this though, I’m looking at what it costs for an individual.

Using AirBNB instead, a nice looking place can be as cheap as £22 a night, so less than half the price of a hotel at only £78. My experience of AirBNB so far in the UK has been good, and I know people who have had a good experience of this overseas. It seems like a good alternative.

The race entry would cost me between €30 and €100 depending on the option I wanted to use. For this, as I'm considering it like the cost of tours, let’s assume the basic one. The €100 option does include free transport for three days prior, and two days after but unless you want the t-shirt and bag included with this then it’s not really cost-effective. With the current exchange rate this is around £27.

This means that with minimal spending money it’s possible to have a long weekend in Europe, based around an event, for only £255 (or £333 for seven days to be comparable to a more "adventurous" trip). I admit this isn’t including spending money or transport to and from the airport. With these it might actually double the cost to around £500 — but even food when you’re travelling can be done cheaper if you make your own lunches from supermarkets and be careful about where you eat in the evenings.

Travel doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s all about finding a balance between economy and an experience you’re happy with.

Next time I'll look closer at how I go about planning trips.