South Korea in Numbers

Days in Korea: 17

Budget cost for 2: $5,907

Total cost for 2: $4,958.12

Total cost per person: $2,479.06

Cost per person per day: $145.83

Here’s the breakdown of our cost for our trip to South Korea:

As you can see, the flights across the pacific made up 44% of our entire cost. This is depressingly unsurprising and not unexpected.

I’ve come to expect that with a working life, vacations will be much shorter and much more expensive. We begin to pay a premium on short term travel because of our limited time off. Of course we would have been more than happy to take more time off work, even if we didn’t get paid, to spend more time overseas but that’s not practical. By contrast, our backpacking trip cost about the same to fly across the Pacific twice but was 89 days long.

Our hotel costs could have been higher but Yuki’s parents paid for one. Conversely, Yuki’s parents shared the cost of admission tickets and food which is why they are smaller proportions

Though, it should be noted that all these numbers are total costs shared between the two of us and paying, typically, for 4 people.

This chart shows how terrible we are at cost estimating. Our initial cost estimate back in May 3 months before we travelled is pretty close to what we ended up spending but then weird things happened. We bought our flight across the Pacific and also took our budget down as we refined our numbers. The budget jumped up beyond the original when we decided to go to Jeju and then stabilized once we’d reserved most of our hotels.

The first time I did this comparison I made a mistake with the budget right before leaving, forgetting to multiply by two for 2 people. This second time around, we see that the first “conservative” estimate is a lot closer to what we actually spent and as we refine our numbers the budget grows and grows as we add in costs like transportation between cities while also trying to cheap out on food and public transportation. Trying to find ways to save money by spending less can be tricky with a budget, especially when you don’t have any research to back up your numbers. Usually when we’re making these budgets we don’t actually do any research, we just make a guess based on places we’ve been before. For South Korea, we made our guess for transportation based on Hong Kong and Tokyo. In the end we ended up at 84% below budget, lower in all categories except for public transportation where we were 200% above. This is awesome, because we paid for nearly all the tickets including those for Yuki’s Mom and Dad. Our budget for 2 people paid for 4 and was exactly as much higher as it should be. Similarly, our food was 57% of budget and we suspect we paid for about 40–50% of the meals.

For the record, we estimated the following per person per day: (cost per day), actual % spending of budget.



Flight across the pacific: $1,100 each

Food: 21$/day (57%)

Admission tickets: 6.67$/day (73%)

Inter city transportation: 100$ * 4 trips (64%)

public transportation: 3.75$/day (200%) -> we paid for Yuki’s Parents

Hotels :44.27 $/day (81%) -> Yuki’s Parents paid for one

Interestingly, we exchanged 2,093$ CAD expecting that we’d have to pay for everything and that this would cover about half. We came back with 226.0325$ CAD not having to exchange any. So it’s reasonable to say that we spent about half the cost. We still haven’t exchanged the remaining back to CAD yet and we’re hoping to exchange it with which ever friend that goes to South Korea next for a 1:1 ratio.

When withdrawing cash and converting, we budget a 10% contingency and then some on top of that. We also brought extra CAD and put a lot of contingency on it because we really didn’t want to have to exchange or withdraw from ATMS.

So lessons here:

• The Conservative estimate is closer to the actual spending than the refined estimates
• We should always include a 10% contingency
• We should try our best to do a budget right before leaving when we’ve nailed down our plan and reserved most of the hotels. That would be the most accurate budget estimate.

Still, the trip turned out well and though I couldn’t quantify how much Yuki’s parents paid for, it was pretty equal. This exercise does bring up the question: “Should we consider our spending to be equal to the first budget or should we consider ourselves to be under budget after we’d paid for flights and reserved hotels?” That’s to say, is it fair to compare it to a budget where we’d already paid for 44% of the cost and reserved hotels for another 23% so we were only estimating the last 33%? Or should we compare it to our original “first guess”?