Trip Cost Calculator
Estimate the total cost of a trip covering transport, accommodation, food, activities and a miscellaneous buffer.
Formula last reviewed 4 August 2026 · How we verify our calculators
Total trip cost
- Accommodation
- ₹6,000
- Food
- ₹3,200
- Subtotal
- ₹15,200
- Misc buffer
- ₹1,520
- Average per day
- ₹4,180
Updates live as you type
Frequently asked questions
It covers transport, accommodation (per night × nights), food (per day × days), activities, and a percentage miscellaneous buffer for the small extras that always crop up.
Tips, local transport, souvenirs and unexpected costs typically add up to roughly 10% of a trip. The buffer keeps your budget realistic rather than optimistic.
It turns a big total into a daily spend you can sense-check and control on the trip, and makes comparing destinations easier.
This is the broad budget tool for any trip — flights, hotels, activities. The Vehicle section’s Road Trip Cost calculator is for self-drive journeys focused on fuel and tolls.
Trim one night of accommodation, and the ripple is visible
₹5,000 transport, ₹2,000/night accommodation for 3 nights (₹6,000), ₹800/day food for 4 days (₹3,200), plus a ₹1,000 activities budget, adds to a subtotal of ₹15,200. A 10% miscellaneous buffer adds ₹1,520, landing on a grand total of ₹16,720 — ₹4,180 average per day across the 4-day trip. Cut one night of accommodation and the total drops by ₹2,000 plus its share of the buffer, not just ₹2,000 flat — seeing that full ripple effect is exactly why an itemised breakdown beats a single lump-sum guess for planning a real budget.
Why every line item feeds one running total
The calculator multiplies out accommodation (rate × nights) and food (rate × days) separately, adds transport and activities on top for a subtotal, then applies the misc buffer last — so adjusting any single input, a cheaper hotel, fewer paid activities, one fewer night, moves the grand total in real time and shows exactly which line item did the moving.
Why the buffer exists, and why it's roughly 10%
Tips, local transport, souvenirs and the small unplanned costs that appear on every trip reliably add up to somewhere around 10% of a trip's core costs — building that in from the start avoids the common experience of a "final" budget quietly overshooting once you're actually travelling and those extras start accumulating.
Where this tool stops, and two others pick up
This is the broad planner for any kind of trip — flights, hotels, activities — not a replacement for more detailed tools on specific line items. For the accommodation line specifically, the hotel budget calculator adds taxes and handles multiple rooms with more precision. If the trip in question is a self-drive road trip rather than flights and hotels, the Vehicle section's road trip cost calculator, focused on fuel and tolls, is the better starting point instead.