Travel Budget Templates

Two free travel budget spreadsheets for Microsoft Excel — one for a business trip, one for a family trip. Below them is the part that decides whether a travel budget holds: the costs that never appear on a booking page, and the card charges that quietly erode your spending money.

Build two budgets, not one

Travel budgets usually fail because everything goes in one column. Splitting them makes the whole thing far easier to control.

Work out the pre-trip total first. Whatever is left, divided by the number of days, is your real daily allowance — and that figure is usually a surprise, which is exactly why it is worth calculating before booking rather than after.

The templates

Two Excel planners. Both arrive as zip files, so extract the spreadsheet before opening it.

Business trip Excel, zippedDownload

Family trip Excel, zippedDownload

The costs that never appear on the booking page

Flights and hotels are the easy part, and the part everybody budgets for. These are the ones that turn a planned trip into an overspent one.

• Travel insurance, and check what it actually covers. Annual policies work out cheaper than single-trip if you travel more than twice a year.
• Visas, entry fees and travel authorisations, plus any processing charges.
• Vaccinations and travel health, which are not always free and sometimes need booking weeks ahead.
• Baggage. Hold luggage, seat selection and oversized items frequently cost more than the fare on budget airlines.
• Getting to and from airports at both ends. Parking, taxis, trains, and the return journey at an awkward hour.
• Resort fees, city taxes and tourist levies, charged at check-in and often not shown in the headline room rate.
• Tipping, where it is expected. In some countries this is a meaningful share of a daily budget.
• Mobile data and roaming, or a local SIM or eSIM.
• Home while you are away — pet care, plant watering, house sitting.
• The first and last day, which are nearly always more expensive than the days between. Airport food, a taxi because you are tired, a meal out because nothing is unpacked.

Money: where a budget quietly leaks

This is the section most travel budget templates skip, and it is worth more than any of the booking advice.

• Always pay in the local currency. When a foreign card machine or cash machine offers to charge you in your home currency instead, decline. That option, dynamic currency conversion, lets the terminal set its own exchange rate, and it is almost always worse than your bank’s. The screen presents it as a convenience; it is a markup.
• Check your card’s foreign transaction fee before you go. Many cards add a percentage to every purchase abroad, which on a fortnight’s spending is a real number. Some cards charge nothing — worth knowing which of yours is which.
• Cash machine charges come in two parts — what the machine charges and what your bank charges. Fewer, larger withdrawals usually cost less than several small ones.
• Budget at a worse exchange rate than today’s. Rates move, and planning at the current rate leaves no margin. A deliberately pessimistic rate costs nothing if you are wrong.
• Tell your bank you are travelling, or expect a card to be blocked on day one.

Keeping track while you are away

1. Record spending daily, not at the end

   Two minutes each evening. Reconstructing a fortnight from memory and receipts is both inaccurate and a miserable way to spend the journey home.

2. Put the sheet in Google Sheets on your phone

   Upload the spreadsheet before you leave. It works offline in the app and syncs when you get signal, which matters when roaming is patchy.

3. Track against the daily allowance

   A running total against a daily figure tells you something useful mid-trip, while you can still adjust. A total against the whole budget only tells you at the end.

4. Keep the sheet afterwards

   What a trip actually cost is the single best basis for budgeting the next one. Save it with the year and destination in the filename.

Common questions