Best Apps for Travel Budgeting

If you know your finances, you're one step closer to making your next trip a reality. It can give you peace of mind, especially if you're planning a longer trip. Check out the best travel expenses apps to help you start with the trip budgeting process and stay on top of your cash flow during your trip.

How to Budget for Your Trip

Make sure you think about the next expenses:

• Identify the biggest expenditures: Start with thinking about the most expensive item, which is usually the airplane ticket. When booking your flight, try to be flexible with dates and destinations. For example, instead of flying to a popular destination, fly somewhere nearby, cheaper. Remember, it's cheaper to fly in the middle of the week and during major holidays.

Photo by NORTHFOLK on Unsplash

• Identify your priorities: Decide how you want to spend your money on your trip. Would you rather have a nice hotel room or go scuba diving? Do you want to splurge on fancy restaurants or you want to enjoy street food? Do you want to buy more souvenirs or go on more day trips? This will help you divide your budget evenly between preferred activities.
• Estimate expenses for transportation, accommodation, and food: Use sites like Booking or Airbnb to find out the approximate room rates and sites like Lonely Planet to calculate meal costs. Discover Car can help you with finding cheap car rentals and Busbud with checking the cost of buses worldwide.
• Don't forget visas, vaccinations, and travel insurance: First, find out if you even need visas for your planned destinations. It could become quite expensive if you're going to countries with complicated bureaucracies. Second, consult with your doctor to find out which vaccinations to get. Third, every experienced traveler will say to spend money on travel insurance, especially if you're planning on going somewhere unusual or engage in extreme activities.
• Always set aside money for emergencies.

Best Travel Budgeting Apps

From getting detailed daily budget reports to changing currencies as you’re on to go and managing finances in bigger groups — these apps offer a variety of features you might find useful when traveling. Find out which travel budget app is the best one for you!

Tripcoin

• Pricing: Free, no limitations inside the app
• Download: App Store
• Key features:
• Create as many trips as you want
• Break costs down by country
• View detailed reports

With Tripcoin, you can enter unlimited trips and unlimited entries per trip. You can decide how detailed you want your data to be and review your expenses with reports. Whether the reports show spendings in each country or your daily spendings, it's up to you. You can customize the app and make your own categories, as well. You don't have to worry when you're changing countries because Tripcoin can automatically convert your spendings to other currencies — and it supports more than 150 of them!

TravelSpend

• Pricing: Free, offers in-app purchases
• 1-month premium subscription: $3,99 (€3,32)
• Lifetime premium access: $17,99 (€14,97)
• Check out other payment options here
• Download: App Store | Google Play 
• Key features:
• Invite family & friends
• Share costs with others
• Follow expenses on a map

TravelSpend is another great travel expense tracker, especially if you're traveling with a larger group. Invite family and friends, organize your spendings, and sync your data in real-time across multiple devices. You can split bills, check balances, see "who owes who", and settle all debts, quickly and easily. The data can be visualized, so you'll be able to analyze your spendings and avoid overspending. The app is available in multiple languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Trail Wallet

• Pricing: Free for the first 25 items, unlimited amounts $4,99 (€4,15)
• Download: App Store
• Key features:
• Set a daily budget
• Quickly scan your bills
• Interactive pie charts

Available for iPhone and iPad, this is an app designed to be fast, so that you can worry less about your spendings and focus on the fun. Travelers praise the app for being quick, intuitive, pretty, and easily customizable so that you can track your expenses in a way that makes the most sense to you. Organize expenses by trip or by month, set a daily budget then easily add expenses as you go, quickly add all your bills with a simple scan, and more. 

Tricount

• Pricing: Free, premium $6,99 (€5,82)
• Download: App Store | Google Play
• Key features:
• Calculate group spendings
• Indicate who’s paying
• Money you owe is highlighted

Tripcount makes sharing expenses simple by doing all the calculating for you — you just have to fill in the costs and the app will take care of the rest. The app is pretty intuitive: enter the expense, indicate who's paying, and invite participants to the group so they can log their own. The money you are owed is highlighted in green and the money you owe in red, so there can be no confusion.

Trabee Pocket

• Pricing: Free, pro upgrade $1,99 (€1,66)
• Download: App Store | Google Play
• Key features:
• Add notes and images
• Convert to your home currency
• Customize categories

Keeping track of travel expenses doesn't have to be boring. With Trabee Pocket, you can add notes and images to your spendings, so the app can become like a little travel diary. Add and remove categories as you wish, and change their colors and icons. The app has the option of converting all your expenses to your home currency so that you have a real feeling of how much you're spending.

Spendee

• Pricing: Free, Plus $14,99 (€12,47)/year, Premium $22,99 (€19,13)/year
• Download: App Store | Google Play
• Key features:
• Connect with bank accounts
• Automatic categorization
• Multiple wallets for specific events

Spendee is an expense tracking app, but it can also be a great trip cost planner with the use of a wallet feature. Tracking your expenses while on holiday can become easier if you’ve already connected your credit cards with your app. The premium version of the app offers an auto-categorization engine so that you don't waste a lot of time on money management. It also enables unlimited budget options to optimize your saving habits.

Trip Expense Manager

• Pricing: Free
• Download: Google Play
• Key features:
• Split expenses between people
• View trip stats by category
• Add descriptions and notes

Trip Expense Manager offers a number of features that help monitor travel expenses for larger groups. Besides splitting expenses with others, you can add expenses just for selected people, add deposit for any person, share expenses in excel sheet format, view statistics in pie charts and bars by category, date, or person, add descriptions, and more.

PocketGuard

• Pricing: Free, offers in-app purchases
• Weekly offer with 7-day trial from $1,99 (€1,66)
• Monthly subscription from $4,99 (€4,15)
• Download: App Store | Google Play
• Key features:
• Link your credit cards
• See which expenses eat up too much
• Grow your savings automatically

PocketGuard is an app designed to simplify personal finances. It makes it easy to control your money, optimize your spendings, and grow savings with an Autosave option. You can also link your bank, credit cards, loans, and investments in one place. With all this info already in your app, tracking your travel budget will become easier, too.

The best way to have a carefree trip is knowing that you won't run out of money before it's over. Hopefully, this won't happen with the help of a kick-ass budget app in your pocket. See which things to see and do at exciting places like Havana, Baku, and Bolivia — and start calculating!