Use a travel app to plan your next vacation. (Dreamstime/TNS)
Ariana Arghandewal | (TNS) Bankrate
We’re at the height of the summer travel season, and that means you’re likely to spend more on booking hotels, flights, and other travel essentials. At the same time, more than one in three people planning a summer vacation in 2024 are considering covering the costs by taking on debt, according to Bankrate’s Summer Travel Survey.
Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your vacation expenses with one of the best travel budget apps can help you avoid overspending and even split the cost evenly among your travel companions.
With so many great travel budget apps on the market, you may be wondering which one to get. It really depends on your travel style and needs. Are you traveling alone or with a group? Do you need a simple budget tracker or do you want planning tools? There’s something for everyone, but here are the best options.
Travel budget apps for work
Calculate costs
Managing your expenses while traveling for business can be challenging. Expensify makes it easy to track your travel expenses. Instead of searching through your luggage for that missing dinner bill, simply take a photo of the bill with the Smart Scan feature and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.
If you’re just tracking your expenses for tax purposes, Expensify offers several handy tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your allowed mileage so you don’t have to enter it manually. This business travel budget app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering working hours to generate the invoice.
Signing up is easy. All you need to do is provide your email address to set up an Expensify account. You can start using the app right away, which is free for most users. A “Collect” account, which includes accounting and payroll tools, costs $5 per month. A “Control” account costs $9 per month and allows for multiple approvers, setting expense policies, and custom reporting tools.
When you sign up for Expensify, you can try the Collect and Control memberships free for seven days.
SAP Concur
If you’re an experienced business traveler, you may already be familiar with the Concur suite (and in some cases, your employer may require you to use it). If not, get ready for one of the most robust and comprehensive business travel solutions available today.
Within the SAP Concur suite, you’ll find separate modules for managing travel plans and submitting reimbursement requests for travel-related expenses. Concur Expense’s ExpenseIt app for travel expenses makes it easy to take photos of your paper receipts and automatically categorize them for submission as expense reports. Concur Travel lets you book your business trips yourself or make arrangements with your company’s chosen airlines, hotels, and other providers.
SAP Concur offers travel management solutions for companies of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. Business owners and managers can try Concur Expense and Concur Travel for free. Individual users who have access to these tools through their employer can download the iOS or Google Play app to get started.
Budget apps for solo travelers
PocketGuard
PocketGuard markets itself as the “#1 budget app for students and high earners,” but it’s actually a great vacation budget planner too. 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 to your travel budget.
All you need to do is provide your income and expense information, and PocketGuard will calculate your disposable income accordingly. If you’re willing to go into debt for a trip this summer, PocketGuard may be able to help you with that too. This spontaneous travel budget app will recommend a strategy for paying off debt in the most efficient way. With PocketGuard, you can set financial goals, save money, and plan future trips as a reward.
Trabee Bag
The Trabee Pocket app offers both travel budgeting and expense tracking in one easy-to-use interface. Trabee lets you set a vacation budget and then enter your expenses to track how much you spend in different categories. The app also offers currency conversion so you can get an accurate overview of your expenses.
At the end of your trip, you can even export your spending data to a PDF or CSV file to use later for your budget planning and tax purposes. Overall, this is a solid vacation budget planning app if you’re looking for a free option. Trabee is available for 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 when traveling through remote areas. The app’s Dropbox integration also allows you to back up your data in case you lose your phone.
Tripcoin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to plan a trip and break down your spending each day by spending category. You can find out how much you spend on transportation, meals, activities, and other travel expenses, helping you stay organized and on top of your budget at each destination.
Tripcoin supports over 150 currencies and automatically reconciles your spending based on current exchange rates. This ensures accurate budget tracking and ensures that you don’t have to perform this tedious task yourself.
Budget apps for groups
Splitwise
When traveling with a group, it’s not always practical for everyone to pay for their own expenses. It’s possible to whip out multiple credit cards to foot the group dinner bill, but booking group tours and even flights individually can be a hassle.
That’s where Splitwise comes in. The app allows users to track shared expenses and the amount owed by each person. This transparency can make it much easier to determine who owes what at the end of a group trip. Frequent traveler and UX specialist Christian Castillo has used Splitwise on several group trips to split expenses evenly with friends.
“The app makes it easy for me to enter expenses as they arise, and I can send them to the group I’m traveling with at the same time,” says Castillo. “So there were no misunderstandings because for ferry rides, dinners and excursions, we all agree to split the costs evenly.”
He touts Splitwise’s ability to directly load expenses and even scan receipts with the paid Pro version of the app. One of the biggest benefits he cites is that everything is available on one platform.
“Splitwise connects to your Paypal, Venmo or bank account where you can quickly pay back your friends. It doesn’t stop you from adding a group of people. Create the group, add expenses – everything is tracked in one place. You can also easily remove people if one of your friends decides they don’t want coffee that day but everyone else does.”
The only downside Castillo notes when using the Splitwise app is the limited functionality of the free version.
“One downside to Splitwise is that unless you have the Pro version, there is a limit to the number of expenses you can enter per day.”
Even if you don’t have to spend $4.99 per month on the pro version, this travel budget app is still very useful. If you’re planning a group trip and want a way to easily split expenses, just download the free app, add group members, and easily do an accounting at the end of the trip.
Batch app
This one’s for the planners. Planning bachelor or bachelorette parties is notoriously challenging, both in terms of 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, or bachelorette party. You can even add your friends to the app to communicate and facilitate planning decisions, as well as split expenses in the app.
While Batch is primarily marketed to hen parties, you can use it to book any type of group activity in participating cities. Although you can do almost all of your travel planning through this app, it doesn’t process payments. It just helps track group expenses through the ledger feature so you can see who owes what. The Batch app is free, but there is an administration fee when booking events.
Travel expenses
In my experience, TravelSpend is one of the best travel budgeting apps. It’s easy to use, automatically converts expenses into your home currency, and allows you to add friends so you can track your spending together. It also gives you an overview of the categories where you spend most of your money. I recently used it to track expenses for a trip to Toronto and it helped me stick to my budget.
It didn’t take long to enter my expenses as they arose and they were immediately deducted from my set travel budget, allowing me to see at a glance how much I had left to spend. It was also nice to see which categories I was putting most of my spending in, which could be handy for those who use a credit card with rotating categories.
You can also export your expenses to a CSV or Excel file to integrate with your other budgeting methods. With the premium version (which costs $4.99 per month), you get additional features like:
—Create custom categories
—Link GPS locations to your costs
—Add Income
—Create your own exchange rate
—View and pay off debts
Even without the additional features of the premium version, using TravelSpend for free is powerful on its own. The biggest downside for me is that while you can track shared expenses, there are no payment integrations within the app, so you’ll have to switch to Venmo, Paypal, or Zelle when it’s time to pay, then go back to TravelSpend to mark the debt as paid.
The conclusion
With the summer travel season in full swing, a travel budget app is more important than ever. Sticking to a budget at home can be challenging in itself, but when you add in the thrill of a vacation, budgeting can quickly spiral out of control if you don’t have the right tools or apps to help you keep it under control. With one of the best travel budget apps, you can stick to your budget, reduce unnecessary spending, and plan your trips more efficiently.
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