We’re in the height of summer travel season, and that means you’ll likely spend more on booking hotels, airfare, and other travel necessities. At the same time, more than one in three people planning a summer vacation in 2024 are considering taking on debt to cover the costs, according to Bankrate’s Summer Travel Survey.
Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your vacation spending with one of the best travel budget apps can help you avoid overspending and even split expenses equally between your travel partners.
Travel Budget Apps for Work
Expensify
Managing your expenses when you’re traveling for work can be challenging. Expensify lets you track your travel expenses easily. Instead of ransacking your luggage for that missing dinner receipt, just snap a picture of the receipt with the Smart Scan feature and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.If you’re merely tracking expenses for tax purposes, Expensify offers several handy tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your eligible mileage for you, so you don’t have to enter it manually. This work travel budget app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering time worked, for billing purposes.
Signing up is super easy. All you have to do is provide your email address to set up an Expensify account. You can start using the app immediately, which is free for most users. A “Collect” account, which includes accounting and payroll tools, costs $5 per month. Meanwhile, a “Control” account costs $9 per month and allows for multiple approvers, setting expense policies, and custom reporting tools.
SAP Concur
If you’re a seasoned business traveler, you may already be familiar with the Concur suite (and in some cases, you may be required by your employer to use it). If you aren’t, get ready to meet one of the most robust, full-featured business travel solutions available today.Solo Travel Budget Apps
PocketGuard
PocketGuard markets itself as the “#1 budgeting app for college students and overspenders,” but it’s actually a great vacation budget planner as well. That’s because the app uses the “in my pocket” feature to calculate how much disposable income you have available. You can then allocate this toward your travel budget.Trabee Pocket
The Trabee Pocket app provides both travel budgeting and expense tracking in a user-friendly interface. Trabee lets you set a vacation budget and then enter your expenses to track how much you’re spending in different categories. The app also provides currency conversion, so you can get an accurate sense of your spending.
At the end of your trip, you can even export your expense data to a PDF or CSV file for future budgeting and tax purposes. Overall, this is a solid vacation budget planner app if you’re looking for a free option. Trabee is available on iOS and the Google Play store.Tripcoin
The great thing about Tripcoin is that you can use it without an internet connection, which is especially important if you’re traveling through remote areas. The app’s Dropbox integration also makes it possible to back up your data in case you lose your phone.Tripcoin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to set up a trip and break down your spending each day by expense category. You can find out how much you’re spending on transportation, meals, activities, and other travel expenses, making it a great way to stay accountable and on top of your budget at each destination.
Budget Apps for Groups
Splitwise
If you’re traveling with a group, it’s not always practical for each person to pay for their own expenses. Pulling out multiple credit cards to cover the group dinner bill is possible, but booking group tours and even airfare can be a hassle when done individually.“The app makes it easy to input expenses as they occur and I’m able to send it to the group that I’m traveling with all at once,” says Castillo. “So no miscommunication has been had because with ferry rides, dinners, and excursions, we all agree to split the cost evenly.”
He touts Splitwise’s ability to load expenses as you go and even scan receipts with the paid pro version of the app. One of the biggest advantages he shares is having everything on one platform.
“Splitwise connects to your Paypal, Venmo, or bank account where you can pay back your friends quickly. It doesn’t stop you from adding a gaggle of people. Create the group, add expenses—it’s all tracked in one area. You’re also able to remove people just as easily if one of your friends decided they did not want coffee that day, but everyone else did.”
The one downside Castillo shares about using the Splitwise app is the limited capability of the free version.
“One downfall about Splitwise is that you do get capped on how many expenses you can input in one day unless you have the pro version.”
Batch App
This one is for the planners. Planning bachelor or bachelorette parties are notoriously challenging on both budget and group logistics. But the Batch app simplifies things with budgeting and planning tools designed to make a variety of parties and vacations less stressful. Users can budget, plan, and book all activities for a dinner party, group trip, birthday party, or bachelorette party. You can even add your friends to the app to communicate and make planning decisions easier, as well as divide up expenses in the app.TravelSpend
In my own experience, one of the best travel budget apps is TravelSpend. It’s simple to use, automatically converts spending to your home currency, and lets you add friends so you can track expenses together. Plus, it gives you a breakdown of which categories you’re doing most of your spending in. I recently used it to track expenses on a trip to Toronto, and it helped me stay within my budget.- Creating custom categories
- Attaching GPS locations to your costs
- Adding income
- Creating your own exchange rate
- Seeing and settling debts
