As you might have already seen, I’ve written a full breakdown of what I spent on each of the Islands in New Zealand:
I thought it might also be useful to have a quick post detailing the total expenditure for my entire 9.5 week trip. This way I can work out a rough idea for you, of how much to budget for New Zealand! I’ll list the spending categories below with the total spend and what that works out to be per day.
EXPENDITURES:
(Total spend in 9.5 weeks/ 65 days)
ACCOMMODATION – $277 / $4.26 per day
ACTIVITIES – $2,222.20 / $34.18 per day
FOOD – $1020.23 / $15.69 per day
DIESEL* – $644.77 / $9.91 per day
EXTRAS – $566.94 / $8.72 per day
VAN STUFF – $126.40 / $1.94 per day
CLOTHES – $225.86 / $3.47 per day
This meant that our average spend each day in New Zealand was NZ$78.17 / £44 / US$56.
BUT please bear in mind this doesn’t include the cost of us buying the campervan and paying for insurance/ WOF/ registration/ repairs etc. After selling our campervan at the end of the trip and working out how much owning the campervan cost us, it was only an additional $428/ £242 / US$311 each. Adding that in increases the the daily spend by NZ$6.58/ £3.73/ US$4.78, which I think is a bloody bargain considering how much we saved on accommodation and how much a bus pass would have cost us! Plus, we had the added bonus of our own space and freedom to travel whenever we wanted 🙂
Our accommodation costs were very low because we were sleeping in our campervan. If you were to travel by bus, you would need to add around $25 per day to bring your accommodation up to $30 a day which is the average cost of a night in a dorm room in a hostel.
The graphs below show the total spend breakdown:
2 Comments
Shauna
July 18, 2018 at 6:18 amHey!! Do you have any blog showing where you stayed in your van or anything? I am planning on doing a similar trip but with camping instead. Thank you!!!
thewildlife
July 20, 2018 at 6:30 pmHeya 🙂 I don’t have a post showing where I stayed sadly… we just used the app “Campermate” to find somewhere each night. Sometimes campsites, mostly just fields/beaches/sides of roads haha. Super easy to use and you can filter by self contained/ non self contained or camping to find spots where you are allowed to stay. Have an awesome trip – NZ is the best! x