8 Apps to Compare to Plan Your Travel Budget for Your Next Vacation

Ariana Arghandevall
| Bankrate

We’re in the peak of summer travel season, and that means you’re likely spending more on hotels, flights, and other travel essentials. 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 Study.

Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your vacation expenses with one of the best travel budgeting apps will help you avoid overspending and even split the costs evenly between your travel companions.

With so many great travel budgeting apps on the market, you may be wondering which one to choose. It all 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.

Business Trip Budgeting Apps

Cost

Managing expenses while traveling for work can be difficult. Expensify makes it easy to track your travel expenses. Instead of searching through your luggage for a missing dinner receipt, simply take a picture of the receipt with Smart Scan and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.

If you’re tracking expenses solely for tax purposes, Expensify offers a few useful tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your qualifying mileage, so you don’t have to enter it manually. This business travel budgeting app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering time worked for billing purposes.

Signing up is super easy. Just provide an email address to create an Expensify account. You can start using the app right away, and it’s 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 lets you have multiple approvers, set expense rules, and custom reporting tools.

When you sign up for Expensify, you can take advantage of a seven-day free trial of Collect and Control membership.

SAP Consent

If you’re a seasoned business traveler, you may already be familiar with Concur (and in some cases, your employer may require you to use it). If not, get ready to encounter one of the most robust, full-featured business travel solutions on the market today.

In the SAP Concur suite, you’ll find separate modules for managing travel plans and submitting travel-related expense claims. Concur ExpenseIt, the travel expense app from Concur, makes it easy to take photos of paper receipts and automatically categorize them for submission as expense reports. Meanwhile, Concur Travel lets you book your own business travel or make arrangements with your company’s chosen airlines, hotels, and other suppliers.

SAP Concur offers travel management solutions for organizations of all sizes—from small businesses to enterprise leaders. Business owners and managers can try Concur Expense and Concur Travel for free; individuals who have access to these tools through their employer can download the iOS app or Google Play to get started.

Solo Travel Budgeting Apps

Pocket cover

PocketGuard bills itself as the “#1 budget app for college students and overspenders,” but it’s actually a great vacation budget planner, too. That’s because the app uses an “in my pocket” feature to calculate how much disposable income you have, which you can then allocate to your travel budget.

All you need to do is enter your income and expenses. PocketGuard will calculate your disposable income accordingly. If you’re ready to get into debt to travel this summer, PocketGuard may be able to help with that too. This spontaneous travel budgeting app will recommend a strategy to pay off debt in the most efficient way. You can use PocketGuard to set financial goals, save money, and plan future trips as a reward.

Trabee Pocket

The Trabee Pocket app offers 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 spend in different categories. The app also provides currency conversion so you can get an accurate idea of your spending.

At the end of your trip, you can even export your spending data to a PDF or CSV file for future budgeting and tax purposes. Overall, this is a solid vacation budgeting app if you’re looking for a free option. Trabee is available on iOS and in the Google Play Store.

Explosive

The biggest advantage of Tripcoin is that it can be used without an internet connection, which is especially important if you are traveling through remote areas. The app’s integration with Dropbox also allows you to back up your data in case you lose your phone.

Tripcoin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to set up your trip and break down your daily spending into expense categories. You can see how much you spend on transportation, meals, activities, and other travel expenses, making it a great way to stay accountable and on track with your budget at each destination.

Tripcoin supports over 150 currencies, automatically adjusting your spending to current exchange rates. This ensures accurate budget tracking and ensures that you don’t have to do this tedious task yourself.

Budgeting apps for groups

Divided

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 bill for a group dinner is possible, but booking group tours or even airline tickets can be a pain when done individually.

That’s where Splitwise comes in. The app lets users track shared expenses and the balance owed by each person. This transparency can make it much easier to figure out who owes what at the end of a group trip. Frequent traveler and UX expert Christian Castillo has used Splitwise on multiple group vacations to split expenses evenly with friends.

“The app makes it easy to enter expenses as they happen, and I can send them to the group I’m traveling with all at once,” Castillo says. “So there’s no confusion because, for things like ferries, dinners, and excursions, we all agree to split the costs equally.”

He touts Splitwise’s ability to upload expenses as they happen, 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 quickly pay your friends back. That doesn’t stop you from adding a group of people. Create a group, add expenses — it’s all tracked in one area. You can also just as easily remove people if one of your friends decides they don’t want coffee that day but everyone else does.”

The only drawback of the Splitwise app that Castillo mentions is the limited capabilities of the free version,

“One of the downsides to Splitwise is that there is no limit to the number of expenses you can enter in a day, unless you use the pro version.”

Even without spending $4.99/month on the pro version, this travel budgeting app is still very useful. If you’re planning a group trip and need a way to split expenses without any hassle, simply download the free app, add your group members, and settle your accounts at the end of the trip without any hassle.

Batch application

This one is for the planners. Planning a bachelor or bachelorette party is notoriously challenging in terms of both budget and group logistics. However, the Batch app simplifies things with budgeting and planning tools designed to make various events and vacations less stressful. Users can budget, plan, and book all the activities for a dinner party, group outing, birthday party, or bachelorette party. You can even add friends to the app to communicate and make planning decisions easier, as well as split expenses within the app.

Although Batch is primarily marketed towards bachelorette parties, you can use it to book any type of group activity in participating cities. While you can plan almost all of your travel through the app, it doesn’t support payments. It only helps you track group expenses with its Ledger feature, so you can see who owes what. The Batch app is free, but there is a processing fee for booking events.

Travel expenses

In my experience, one of the best travel budgeting apps is TravelSpend. It’s easy to use, automatically converts your spending to your local currency, and lets you add friends so you can track your spending together. It also breaks down your spending categories. I recently used it to track my spending on a trip to Toronto and it helped me stay on budget.

It didn’t take me long to enter expenses as they came up, and they were immediately subtracted from my set travel budget, so I could see at a glance how much I had left to spend. It was also nice to see which categories I spent the most on, which would be useful for those using a credit card with a rotating category.

You can also export your expenses to a csv or excel file to integrate with other budgeting methods. The premium version (which costs $4.99 per month) provides additional features, such as:

— Create custom categories

— Including GPS location in costs

— Adding Income

— Creating your own exchange rate

— Seeing and settling debts

Even without the extra features of the premium version, using TravelSpend for free is powerful enough on its own. The main drawback for me is that while you can track shared expenses, there’s no in-app payment integration. 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 debts as paid.

Summary

With summer travel season upon us, having a travel budgeting app is more important than ever. Sticking to a budget at home can be difficult on its own, but when you add the excitement of vacation, budgeting can quickly become overwhelming if you don’t have the right tools or apps to help you master it. By using one of the best travel budgeting apps, you can stay on budget, cut back on unnecessary expenses, and plan your trips more efficiently.