Trip budget calculator: what a week really costs
The calculator takes a destination, the number of nights, the number of people and a travel style, and turns them into a total with line items: accommodation, food, local transport, admission, getting there and a reserve. What matters is not the total but which line drives it. That is exactly what you cannot see in advance. "A week in Rome for 1,200 euro" sounds the same whether 700 of it goes on the room or 700 on the flights. Only once the lines are separated do you know where saving helps and where it ruins the trip.
The trip
Getting there and buffer
What the trip costs
The daily rates used
| Item | Budget | Middle | Comfort |
|---|---|---|---|
| The table appears once a destination is chosen. | |||
Editorial reference values, as of September 2026: accommodation per room and night, everything else per person and day. They come from our own samples on booking sites and from the dated prices in our guides. They are not offers and not a price guarantee. In high season and over public holidays the real figures sit well above them.
Where to book the items Ad
Your numbers stay in your browser: the calculator works locally and sends nothing to anyone.
How the calculation works
Accommodation is counted per room and night, not per person: two people in one double room pay once. That is what the "people per room" field is for. Four people sharing two rooms give two rooms; four people in single rooms give four. Food, local transport and admission run per person and per day. Travel days are nights plus one, because the arrival day and the departure day both cost money even though only six nights sit between them. You enter the cost of getting there yourself, per person and for both directions together. The calculator does not know airfares and never will: it would need a connection to the outside world for that, and it is built not to have one. Finally the reserve is added as a percentage of everything else. Twelve per cent is a workable starting point for Europe. With children, or with a long journey and a connection, fifteen is closer to reality.
Where the daily rates come from
The rates are editorial reference values as of September 2026. They come from our own samples on booking sites and from the prices that appear, with a check date, in our guides to those cities. They are not offers, not an official statistical average and not a price guarantee. Three levels cover the usual range. "Budget" means a hostel, a simple guesthouse or a room outside the centre, with most food bought in shops. "Middle" means three stars or an apartment within reach of the centre and one hot meal out per day. "Comfort" means four stars in the centre and no discussion about the bill. Two things break every level: high season and public holidays. In Venice in August, in Munich during Oktoberfest and in any city over New Year, room rates regularly sit fifty to a hundred per cent above the table. The calculator does not add that automatically, because the surcharges vary too much. If you travel on those dates, raise the reserve sharply or use the next level up for accommodation. The price levels apply to the city and the area immediately around it. A trip to the coast or into the mountains mainly changes the local transport line.
What the calculator cannot do
It does not convert currencies. Everything is in euro, because exchange rates would mean a request to the outside. For destinations outside the euro area, take your bank's rate on the day and do one rough conversion by hand. It does not know your kind of trip. A museum person spends twice as much on admission and half as much on food; a beach holiday reverses that. The lines are listed separately so that you can adjust exactly those, instead of believing the total. It does not tell you whether you can afford the trip. It tells you roughly what it costs. Comparing that with what you can set aside is a different calculation, and everyone runs it in their head. And it knows no special cases: tourist tax, city tax, motorway vignette, baggage surcharge and airport parking belong in the "fixed extra costs" field. On a week-long trip those rarely add up to less than fifty euro.