How do I Know How Much to Budget for Food on my Trip?
- njheck962
- Mar 1, 2023
- 5 min read
Budgeting for food can be one of the trickiest parts of planning a trip, even for seasoned trip planners.
And yet, it can often determine whether you can afford to go or should stay home.
What makes it so hard?
Among other things...
People can spend vastly different amounts on food, even if they are eating at the same restaurant.
Some people eat out for every meal and others will eat at their Airbnb or pack a lunch.
People's ideas of "good food" differ drastically.
Restaurants in touristy locations are often twice as expensive as a similar restaurant one street over, so you're often comparing apples to oranges.
Food prices change regularly (especially during and after COVID).
Reporting is inaccurate. It's easy to keep track of airfare and hotel costs. Food is not as simple to tabulate.
So, how do you know how much to budget for food?
After a few gross under/overestimates, we have found a few resources we use to answer that question:
1. Crowdsource it
Join a FB group or TripAdvisor forum related to travel in your destination and ask for recent costs. Often, this is the most up-t0-date information you can get. Find families similar to yours in size as a comparison. And be sure that your travel style is similar. If they sound like the kind who reads the menu from right to left and you're a budget eater, these are not your people.
Or ask for pricing on specific items (milk, a bottle of water, a meal for two at a restaurant, etc.) so you can gauge things from there.
Reddit is also a great resource. If you love a good rabbit hole, this is the place for you. Reddit can be particularly useful if you have dietary restrictions that might impact your travel and you need information on how accommodating certain countries are. (Spoiler alert: France is not tolerant of dietary restrictions.) You can find a Reddit feed about ANYTHING. Just be sure you check the dates on the responses because there are lots of pre-COVID posts and comments that could throw off your calculations.
2. The Economist's Big Mac Index
It may seem lowbrow coming from the hoity-toity Economist, but they have put a great deal of research into the Golden Arches. They compare prices of Big Macs across the globe and compile their findings into an easy-to-read format that helps you understand where prices are higher than you are used to and where they're a bargain. The same could be done with cappuccinos or milk (although there's the gallon-liter conversion issue in some cases). But by choosing an entire meal instead of one component, they are giving a more rounded picture of the food scene for each place.
SIDE NOTE/WARNING: AVOID GETTING YOUR INFO FROM INFOGRAPHICS
The Big Mac website above may seem like an infographic, but it isn't. It's much more involved than that.
Our general rule of thumb is that if the information is pretty, it's probably not accurate.
Take this infographic from Kiplinger.com about food prices. It seems simple enough, but when it was posted on the WorldSchoolers FB group (a group for long-term digital nomads), the entire community burst into laughing emojis. How are Greece and Portugal on a Top 10 list of cheapest places to visit when 1 billion people in the world currently live on less than a dollar a day? Where is Bangladesh? Or Sri Lanka? Or Guatemala?
And how do you jump from $5 to $34 in just 10 countries?
The truth is that this is probably information geared to an audience. Kiplinger, a finance magazine for people with lots of disposable income, probably narrowed the list to the top ten that they thought their readers would want to go to.
Most websites preach to their own choir. Infographics are the sermon notes.
3. Check Expatistan and Numbeo
When I'm budgeting for a trip, I make a quick check of websites like Expatistan and Numbeo. They are crowdsourced, up-to-date reports of pricing in various places. No, they aren't scientifically polled, but what they lack in standardized deviations they make up for in timeliness. For the most part, they are fairly accurate representations of the food situation on the ground at any given point.
We then use this info to inform our planning. For example, on a recent trip to Switzerland, we had been warned by Numbeo (and many other sites and people) that food was exorbitantly expensive. We were on a 7-week European trek, and we didn't have euros to waste. So, we stopped at the last French grocery store before the Swiss border and loaded up with enough food to last us through our Swiss stay.
As reported, the prices of things skyrocketed as soon as we crossed the border. Our
afternoon coffee ended up costing almost $30! (In our defense, coffee was a much-needed splurge that day.) Other than a few forgotten items, we ended up buying little to nothing during our stay and probably saved over $150.
Use the numbers to inform your planning and you can save tons.
4. Look up menus
Are you one of those people who chooses what you want to eat even before you make reservations? I'm not....but I almost am when I travel.
Even before I know where I'm going to eat or even where I'm going to stay, I get a general idea of the prices of things by using Google Maps to find a restaurant in the area I'm considering.
Side note that Shows my Age: Can you believe that we live in an era when I can Google the menu of a tiny restaurant in Hanoi or family-run pizzeria in Milan from my couch? That's truly amazing.
Use those menus to gauge whether you can afford to go. When we went to Barcelona, I found a reasonable AirBnb a few streets from the ritzy Gran Via. I wasn't sure whether the restaurants in that area would be affordable, even if the apartment was. So I Googled it. Sure enough, the restaurants nearer to Gran Via were out of my price range. But a few streets the other direction there were tons of reasonable, local eateries for real people on real budgets. So we booked it and went, confident that we would find somewhere to eat nearby.
There is no way to pinpoint exactly how much to budget, but you can definitely make an educated guess based on all this intel. Don't get lost in a Reddit rabbit hole or a FB spiral, though. An hour or two of dedicated research on these sites and you will usually be able to put together a reasonable budget.
Just remember to look off the tourist route before you make your budget. It will probably make you realize that travel is much more affordable than it looks at first glance.
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