How Much Does it Cost to Travel the World for One Year?
Our World Trip in Numbers
It’s been just over a year since we packed up our apartment in Burnaby and set off to travel the world for a year. Over the last year we’ve created some of the best memories of our lives and are eternally grateful that we left work life to go traveling.
One of my favourite pastimes is logging all of our expenses and seeing how much life costs. I’ve previously blogged about how much it cost us to live in Vancouver and completed an analysis of eating in VS eating out. Now that we’ve completed one year of travel, I’m compiled the data and compared it to the four years we spent living in Vancouver.
I took all the data and created a little infographic for easy presentation:
In total, for 1 year of travel we each spent $25,435 CAD. This includes everything from buying backpacks and vaccinations before we left, to all the flights, hotels, food, medicine, and souvenirs we bought while we were traveling. Surprisingly, the cost to travel day-to-day (i.e. without flights) is just $52 per person…which is less than what we were spending in Vancouver.
The most expensive part of traveling is flights and when we include that in the daily cost, we see that travel becomes more expensive than living in Vancouver. This isn’t surprising, but it isn’t significantly more either — just 25% more.
The great thing about travel is that it can be done at any budget: from frugal to luxurious. We’re definitely close to the frugal end of the spectrum and it helps that we don’t drink a lot of alcohol, party hard, or spend lots on “once in a lifetime” experiences. We’re actually pretty boring travellers who like to hang out in a nice AirBnB as much as we like to go out and do things.
Another reason the our total cost is so low is because we actually haven’t been to that many countries. A lot of people that do gap years bounce around to as many places as they can, spending just a few weeks in each place. We tend to spend around two weeks at each location and — in the case of Japan — spent 3 months in one country.
Although we didn’t stick to just cheap countries and went to such places as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, we’ve been able to limit our spending by eating take-out food at grocery stores and relatively healthy fast food, which is substantially less than eating out in restaurants every day.
Perhaps the most significant discovery we’ve made is how much we’ve saved through AirBnB. Of the 103 different places we stayed, half of those were through AirBnB simply because we found it cheaper than hotels. We also stay with friends or family in Bangkok, San Francisco, and Vancouver when we could, but AirBnB is consistently cheaper than hotel websites and on top of that they have the best customer service and guarantees. To give you an example: our flight from Korea to Okinawa got delayed by one day and booking.com wouldn’t give us a refund for the one night we missed; by contrast, when Japan changed their house-sharing laws and caused an AirBnB host to cancel our reservation due to his inability to get a registered license in time, we got double the refund plus $100 to use on any AirBnB Experience.
It’s worth pointing out that while traveling, I’ve been also working part-time, which has worked out fabulously for both the company and myself. Not only do I enjoy engineering work but I get to do it at the time of day that suits me, and from anywhere in the world. I’m not tied to a desk or an 8–5 job, and I love it. The part-time work can be inconsistent — with some months being busy and other months where I don’t do any work — but throughout the last year I managed to make $13,200 CAD. That’s a quarter of our combined travel cost and definitely helps fund the travel! I’m hoping that there’s more work in Year Two.
Keeping track of expenses is both an interesting past-time of mine and a wonderful tool for budgeting the future. We were originally planning on only traveling for a year, but barely a quarter of the way into our journey we decided to extend our travel by another year. We are now just halfway through our world trip. Because we track our expenses, we can estimate how much Year Two will cost and ensure that we have enough savings to cover it.
A year has gone by quickly and we’ve collected some fond memories. Here, we revisit photos from some of the best highlights of our trip. In particular, we really enjoyed our three-week road trip around the south island of New Zealand.
From the first day to the last, it was a landscape of epic vistas and wonderful sights. I particularly enjoyed the town of Wanaka for its location in the junction of several mountain valleys. You can see our blog photos here: New Zealand road trip.
It would be hard to forget Amy and Travis's destination wedding in the Dominican Republic. We made some great new friends and were really grateful that we were part of such a special moment. It was a drastic change to go from backpacking to an all-inclusive resort…which led us to leave with food stashed in our bags.
From the all-inclusive resort wedding to Dominican towns where we couldn’t find enough food, we continued onto a 7-night cruise through the Caribbean and found ourselves stuffing our faces and regaining weight in between snorkeling at Caracao and Bonaire — the clearest and most serene underwater seascapes we’ve ever seen.
Three months in Japan is a long time, but we wish it had been longer. We both really like Japan and would like to live there one day. Although almost all of Japan was spectacular, one of the highlights was being there in the spring to see the cherry blossoms. It’s really quite spectacular to see famous landscapes lit up with pink cherry blossoms. As well, we really enjoyed visiting the famous the castles, shrines, and gardens.
We finished the year back in North America with three Taylor Swift concerts — and although the performances were epic, the truly memorable part was meeting all of the other fans who recognized Yuki from her social media accounts and who had come up to say hello.
The last year’s been great. There have been ups and downs, but we’ve made many good memories. In Year Two we’ll be going to some new places but also spending a lot of time in familiar places — we’re planning on spending more time in Japan because if you like it, why not go back? We’re not on a quest to collect passport stamps or see all of the world… even if we tried to visit the rest of the world, there’d never be enough time.
