TravelSpend is the answer
If you ever faced the problem of splitting up all the travel costs on a trip with other people, you are in luck: We’ve found this cool startup that created an app that will help you track costs. It’s called TravelSpend! We wanted to introduce the founders to you and also the general concept of the app. Hop right in!
I wish I could afford to work less and travel more. No matter if you want to go hiking in the Alps, sailing in the Mediterranean, or long term backpacking in India, I’m sure you’ll all agree that plain old money is usually the primary constraint when it comes to traveling. That’s why it’s critical to plan your budget and track your spending when you want to travel inexpensively. In this article, I’d like to show you a super neat app that I use to manage my money on my trips. We at JoinMyTrip often get asked how to handle money on a trip and today, we brought you the answer.
How do I track costs?
Now there are many ways to track your costs while traveling in a group. For example, you can jot down all your expenses in a notebook or use an Excel sheet as a simple ledger. But that’s just so tedious and even worse: you quickly get confused as you don’t have a proper visual overview of your spending. Especially when you’re traveling with your partner or with a group, you easily lose track of your spending and your actual budget.
At JoinMyTrip, we recently met Ina and Jonas. They were on a six-month trip through Southeast Asia when they decided to build an app that solves this exact problem. Their app is called TravelSpend, and it’s a money tracker app for travelers. We love it because it’s super easy to use and yet has a lot of useful features.
How to use the app?
Using TravelSpend is easy, and it’s free in the basic version. Let me show you an example of a trip to Georgia, a country high up on my bucket list. First, you create a trip to set your budget and your preferred home currency. I’ve called my trip “Georgia 2020” and put in a budget of €2000.
Enter all your expenses as you go
The app will automatically try to choose the right currency based on where you are and convert it to your home currency. As you can see, I’ve added some expenses for flights, accommodation, and meals already.
Where do I check my spending?
Your daily average and the total spend indicators tell you how much you’ve got left of your budget and how fast you’re spending your money. This is incredibly helpful in making sure you stick to your budget and don’t overspend.
When you travel together with friends, you can simply invite them to your trip so they can add expenses too. This way, you can even keep track of who paid for what and split costs to answer that annoying question of who owes whom.
The statistics and visualizations in TravelSpend can be quite addictive. There is a pretty pie chart to show you where your money went and a map with all the places where you’ve spent money on your trip.
All in all, TravelSpend is the perfect companion to help you keep your money together when traveling on a budget. You can check it out yourself and give this handy travel budgeting app a try.
If you like to read even more on how to plan a group trip and keep everything organized, feel free to browse through the following articles:
