We need to start this week’s blog with:
We leave for Costa Rica in 21 days (and 20 hours, 32 minutes, and 9 seconds). We’re still experiencing single digit temperatures here in KC and this snow will just not melt. A week in a tropical rainforest is sometimes the only thing that keeps us going.
We wanted to spend our time with you this week talking about how we approach travel finances. We are not the kind of people who allocate $3000 to $5000 on a trip twice a year. We are inherently frugal people and that translates to our travel.
Let’s take the upcoming Costa Rica trip, for example. When all is said and done, this trip will cost us less than $1000 out of pocket (depending on how much we spend on food, rum, and excursions). That’s it!
Flights
Steph is a hawk when it comes to flight prices. She uses Google Flight alerts, Capital One Travel price alerts, and the Going watchlist to determine when prices will be cheapest. We can get to pretty much every place in the Caribbean for less than $400 per person. We just have to time our trips right (NOT in the summer or over holidays), be ok with longer layovers, and start planning far enough in advance to be able to jump on cheap fares when they happen.
For Costa Rica, we found flights for $359.93 per person. The layovers are about 6 hours, but we have VIP lounge access through our Capital One Venture X card, so we can eat and drink for free while we wait.
We also paid another $112 for seat reservations. Gene needs aisles seats or he starts to feel claustrophobic, so we pay for an aisle seat for him. We typically reserve the window seat for Steph. When we board, one of two things happens, either the flight is full and the poor soul in the middle seat happily trades for the window, or no one books the middle seat and we get the row to ourselves. Most often it is the former, but it costs nothing extra to take the chance.
Lodging
Because of when our flights arrive, we are staying in a hotel near the airport for our bookend nights (the night we fly in and the night before we fly out). For this trip we got a little creative, and we may end up regretting it. We booked a 3 bed hotel room (we are travelling with 2 other couples) for $213/night. We’re going to have a grown up slumber party! Stay tuned to see how well that works out for us, but it makes our total hotel stay $142 for both nights, so you can’t beat the price.
Our Airbnb is the largest cost at $940 per couple for 5 nights. That comes to $188 per night per couple, which is less than a hotel room would cost us at a resort. The Airbnb has a pool and is within walking distance to the beach, the grocery store, and a few bars and restaurants. In our opinion, Airbnbs (or VRBOs) are superior to a hotel. When traveling with a group, you can all hang out together in the house’s common areas. Renting a home also tends to allow you to get away from the touristy areas (if you choose to) so you can get a better sense of the culture of a place.
Ground Transportation
Mal Pais is about a 3 hour drive (plus a 70 minute ferry ride) from the airport. We will spend half a day traveling to our Airbnb. We could have found someplace closer to the airport, but we would be trading our laid back fishing surfing village for a more touristy experience. We’re ok with the travel and will use the time to take in the Costa Rican landscapes.
We all went back and forth a bit between hiring a van to shuttle us from the airport to Mal Pais or renting a car. We determined renting a car was cheaper and gave us the freedom to travel around during the week if we want. One of the guys in our group gets good car rental prices through his company, so we rented one that will fit all 6 of us (and our luggage) for $250 per couple (plus gas).
There is also a 70 minute ferry ride across the Gulf of Nicoya. The ferry costs $24 for the car and $1.50 per person. If we are doing the per couple math, that’s $11 per couple.
Food and Fun
We always struggle with how much to allocate for spending money, given that every country has a different cost of living and some areas (the more touristy ones) tend to charge higher prices. Typically, we allocate $200 per day. For 8 days, that is $1600. We have found this rule of thumb to work in most of the areas we have visited so far.
Actual cost versus real cost
If you’ve been doing the math, that comes to $3,774.86 for this trip to Costa Rica. And that is with us being pretty frugal in how we travel. We think that for a week in Costa Rica, this is a reasonable cost.
However, we are NOT shelling out that amount of money for this trip. Not even close.
Here is how our actual finances for this trip shake out:
Without the spending money (which we can control based on the choices we make on the trip), this trip will cost us $387 in “hard costs.”
We leveraged credit card points for the flights and hotel, as well as most of the Airbnb. As we have mentioned before, we put all of our household expenses on our Venture X card each month and amass a decent number of travel points each month.
We opened a Chase Sapphire card a few months ago for the $600 (in miles) spending bonus. That plus the miles we accrued on the money we spent getting that bonus paid for most of the Airbnb. We also had a credit from an Airbnb horror story from Puerto Rico (it was bad) that we hadn’t used yet.
Our spending money is my favorite hack. It is no secret that we are downsizing and jettisoning a good number of our possessions. As we declutter, we list things for sale on Facebook Marketplace. We stick the cash we get from those sales in a jar in our bedroom for travel.
So in the end, we are out less than $1000, and that is assuming we spend all of our “food and fun” cash. That is 25% of the “list” price for this trip.
What is your favorite financial travel hack? Do you have great tips for using travel reward miles? Let us know in the comments!
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