No one has asked this question yet, but I am sure they will!! It must be one of the most popular questions out there concerning travel, and I wonder how long it will take to hit the top 5 of our most read blog posts.
Cash
For our seven week trip, our basic budget was $150 a day with flights on top. This is very doable with quite a bit of comfort in the countries we visited except Singapore, and we really didn’t think about money much at all.
We ended up with a budget of $200 a day for the first two weeks, thanks to a generous birthday and Christmas gift from my mum. We basically put this extra money into accommodation and private transfers. This was an awesome budget for Malaysia and Thailand. We also upped our budget for Boracay, as there was just no way we were going to be able to spend only $150 a night there and have accommodation we were happy with (the hotel alone was nearly this).
So did we keep to budget?
Yes! Except with Singapore. We saved enough money in the Philippines that we were able to up our budget for Philippines and Malaysia. We actually didn’t even pay attention to the budget in the final week, but still hit it just about perfectly.
Anyway, the break down! This includes EVERYTHING for our 7 week trip except flights and my shopping spree in KL. So all transport, including overland journeys, accommodation, meals, nappies, etc. It is in Australian dollars.
Kuala Lumpur (at the beginning):
$202 a day
Thailand:
$189 a day.
Philippines:
Excluding Boracay:
$125 a day – absolute bargain as we did a lot of overland travel, spent whatever we wanted and stayed in best places.
Boracay:
$213 a day. Everything is more expensive in Boracay, and the main killer was accommodation which set us back $146 a night.
Taiwan:
$163 a day. Awesome value as we stayed in a great apartment for most of the time and had such good food.
Singapore:
$207 a day.
Malaysia:
$167 a day
Flights:
Our original long haul flights out of Melbourne on Air Asia were a total bargain – $1374 in total for 4 people (we bought seats for both kids), and includes all charges as well as food, luggage and seat allocations. We had to change the second flight when we extended. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a sale price at that time and it cost us $670 in total to change it – including change fees and extra flight costs.
In total we spent $1754 on all our other flights! $625 of that was just on our Taipei – KL flight, so only $1100 to fly:
KL – Bangkok return
KL – Clark (Manila)
Clark – Kalibo (for Boracay)
Iloilo City – Clark
Clark – Taipei
KL – Singapore
This is awesome I think! This includes meals on just about every flight, 40kg of luggage and 3-4 seats and infant fee (sometimes it was cheaper to buy Z a seat than have him travel as an infant). Most these flights weren’t booked on sale either, so you could save a fair bit of money by just planning in advance.
In conclusion, just over $3000 got us between Australia and Asia and to 5 countries within Asia.
In Total?
I don’t want to know how much in total, so I will leave this to you to figure out for yourselves!! I guess it must have been about $10000 🙂 You could definitely travel for a fair bit cheaper than this. If our kids were even a bit older, we probably would have, since we do like taking local transport and walking.
You may also like to check out the total cost of our 10 week trip to the USA and Caribbean.
Tags: costs Malaysia Travel Blog Philippines Travel Blog Singapore Travel Blog Taiwan Travel Blog Thailand Travel Blog Travel Tips
