How Much Did It Cost A Couple to Travel India?
Well, that depends on whether you want to live like a queen or get down and dirty.
I have been to India twice before and each time my travel style has been quite different!!
Once was for a few weeks in 2000 with a couple of friends - with my first friend we hired an old white Ambassador car (plus driver) and travelled in style, staying in old palaces and comfortable hotels. This wasn’t such a ridiculous extravagance as it sounds - India is fantastically cheap by Western standards. After my friend flew home, I met up with another friend and we backpacked our way to Nepal staying in cheap hostels.
The second visit was on a package holiday from the UK to Goa for Christmas by the beach. Not the ‘real’ Indian experience, but holds a special place in our hearts as it was on this trip that Chris hid an engagement ring in one of my Christmas presents and asked me to get married!
This time we travelled for 5 months together, with Chris staying one more month to travel solo.
Here's how our costs panned out....
Total Spend
For the 5 months we were together we spent a total of:
487,594 Rupees
Which is 97,519 Rupees per month, or
3,229 Rupees per day
Roughly, the equivalent* of...
$10,601 NZD
£5,603
6,041 Euros
$6,792 USD
*exchange rate calculated as of August 24 1019
This is for TWO people for FIVE months! I think that's a good deal.
Budgeting & Planning Before We Left
Chris is the free spirit and I’m the planner of the relationship! Before we left home I created a spreadsheet which attempted to give us some ideas of whether our travelling was going to be feasible given the amount of money we’d saved.
For each country we plan to visit I did a bit of a ‘finger in the wind’ research about the costs of travelling - what the costs are for real basic backpacking, mid-range or top end…. I didn’t overdo it, but just wanted to reassure myself that we weren’t being totally crazy to give up our jobs, rent our house out and say a temporary goodbye to our friends in order to travel!
Although we’re travelling in a very ‘fluid’ unplanned kind of way (Chris-style!!) I made a rough guesstimate of how long we were going to spend in a country.
We ended up with a spreadsheet calculation for each country based on a mid-range budget, per day and overall for our likely length of visit to that country. I put it in the local currency as well as NZD. Happy to share if anyone wants a copy - just message me.
Really helpful websites for this exercise were Budget Your Trip and Lonely Planet which has a “costs” section for each country.
For India I estimated we’d spend 4,000 Rupees per day as a couple ($86 NZD / £46 / 50 Euro / $55 USD)
Keeping Track
We wouldn’t have had a clue what we were spending if it wasn’t for keeping a track of everything we spent. I downloaded a great free app called Wally to my phone and we put every expense, no matter how small, into this. At the end of each day, week or month we reviewed how much we spent and on what. It’s not specifically a travel-expense app and has got a heap of other features, but we just used it in simple form.
I had started with another app called Trail Wallet which was good and built especially for travellers, but it charged after only 20 entries and so I switched to Wally which worked well for us.
At the end of each month I plugged our totals into my budget spreadsheet against key expenditure groups.
Middle-Aged, “Mid-Range” Travellers - What Did We Spend It On?
Over our five months we averaged 3,229 Rupees per day.
$70 NZD
£37
40 Euros
$45 USD
We’re on a long-term travel adventure, so we are definitely on a budget, but I wouldn’t describe us as ‘budget backpackers’, more comfortably careful! Here’s how our spending went for our 5 months.
Accommodation
Total - 157,826 Rupees
Daily - 1,045 Rupees
Accommodation is the biggest expense. We are in our 40s and definitely over the idea of sharing bathrooms and sleeping in dorm rooms!
We stayed in double ensuite rooms, usually with a fan or air con, depending on the temperatures!
I tended to search for accommodation around 1,000 Rupees a night. Our cheapest hotel was around 600 Rupees and our most expensive was about 1,800.
Food
Total - 124,893 Rupees
Daily - 827 Rupees
Our next biggest cost was food. We’re happy to eat local as long as our stomachs can handle it.
Chris is a bit more tender than mine - see vlogs of his dodgy-belly in Kolkata, Darjeeling, Varanassi, Manali…. so we tend to avoid street food and eat in restaurants. A main dish in an average restaurant would cost between 100-200 Rupees per person; in a real ‘local’ place it might be less than 100, but in the expensive tourist places might be 400-500! Cheap by Western standards, but expensive for India.
Juices or sodas ranged from about 10 - 200 Rupees; coffee or chai from a stall or a railway hawker was 10 Rupees, from a tourist cafe was 200.
Alcohol
Total - 13,822 Rupees
Daily - 91 Rupees
Alcohol really added to our budget compared with food, but is something we enjoy! A big 500ml bottle of Kingfisher beer cost between 80 Rupees take-out to 300 Rupees in an upmarket hotel.
I did have 2 or 3 glasses of Indian wine which I wouldn’t rave about, but it was drinkable. When we were in Goa we supped cocktails, especially in the 2 for 1 happy hours and in Sikkim we bought a bottle of local whisky - drinkable, but not that great.
We would have spent more, but a couple of Indian states were totally dry (no alcohol) and a few places had ‘dry days’, especially just before their elections….we seemed to be following the elections state by state and so had more alcohol-free days than planned!!
Transport
Total - 61,193 Rupees
Per day - 405 Rupees
You could definitely have travelled cheaper by going on local non-air-conditioned, wooden-seated and crowded buses, or you could travel more lavishly by private chauffer-driven car, as many Indians do. We largely travelled quite comfortably, but not luxuriously, except when left alone it seems Chris managed to find his way on an internal flight on one day and a first class train the next! He’d have never done that if I was around!!
We enjoyed travelling across the rail network - from the Southern tip to the Himalayas, from the West to the East and back again. Lots of overnight trains, unless the journey was a shorter one or one that was known for being scenic. We mainly travelled by 2nd class - sometimes air conditioned (freezing), sometimes not. We both enjoy rail travel and felt it was safer than road travel.
We also travelled by ‘tourist’ buses which link popular tourist destinations and in the Himalayas we used shared jeeps and even a couple of private taxis when there was no alternative. On one of the election days when there was no public transport we hired a taxi for a journey of about 4 ½ hours and it only cost us about 3,000 - less than it used to cost me to get a taxi for 20 minutes from our house to the airport in NZ!
When we got to a city we would walk, get local buses or use rickshaws (tuk tuks) to get about. Buses were cheap (about 10 Rupees per person), autos ranged widely from city to city - so I learned to ask our hotel before we checked-in what we should expect to pay to get a rickshaw to their hotel and that was a good starting point. Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata all had fabulously modern and cheap underground metro services and we hired a scooter in a couple of places where we felt safe-ish!
Fun
Total - 60,594 Rupees
Daily - 401 Rupees
Lots of amazing monuments were free, especially in the south. Otherwise we bought entry tickets to museums and cultural sites (anything from 10 Rupees to 1,100 for the Taj Mahal), my week’s yoga / meditation retreat, a tour of the Mumbai slums, water park entry, trekking, going to the movies, massages, a bike ride of Delhi, tiger safari and so on.....
We did everything we wanted to do without being restrained by money. There were times when we didn't go into some museums or monuments because there was a charge but only if we were not fussed about visiting.
Travelling Solo
For the month Chris travelled on his own he spent 33,652 Rupees, or 1,202 in total…. Mmmm, seems he managed to travel more cheaply than I’d expected him to solo! Accommodation was more expensive per person, but he travelled in the far north where it was a little cheaper than the "Golden Triangle."
Get It Right For You
India is a great country to travel cheaply. OK - not everyone else is going to buy a gimble and microphone for their vlogs or a sari to wear around NZ!! I feel we got a good balance in our spending, some of our greatest experiences were meeting the locals which was free, but I also confess that having time out in a clean, quiet, cool room was sometimes just what we needed.