Three Great Apps to Track Your Travel Budget
April 20, 2016
Three Great Apps to Track Your Travel Budget
By Chaitanya Bala
At last, we have approached the final portion of our travel budget series. I’ve prepared you well with tips on how to cut costs while traveling and how to actually create a travel budget. Now that you know many of the different components that go into travel budgeting, all that’s left to show you is some awesome tools where keeping track of your budget is actually manageable and not torture. (‘Cause who really wants to be crunching away numbers on a calculator during vacation, right?!) Here’s our list of the 3 best travel budget apps to make managing your expenses a piece of cake!
Trail Wallet - Travel Budget & Expense Tracker
(iOS App)
User Rating: 4.8 Stars
What’s cool about this app is how simple it is to keep track of your daily budgeted amount. For example, let’s say you’re going to New York City for the weekend and you’ve decided to maintain a budget of $80/day. All you need to do is add in your trip to NYC, and $80 as your daily budget. As you go through the day, you just touch the large plus sign button in the middle and add in your expenditure and the category it belongs to. In case you need someone giving you constant feedback about your expenditures, this app also has some fun cartoons that make comments about your purchases.
The only real drawback I found in this app is that there is no way to allocate your budget into different categories; only expenditures. You just add in a large lumped up amount, and it can be hard to accurately determine exactly how much is a reasonable amount to spend without these different categories.
TrabeePocket: Travel Expense
(Android & iOS App)
User Rating: 4.5 Stars
Similar to Trail Wallet, you add in the vacation you’re going on within this app. So for example, if you’re going to South Korea, you simply add South Korea as your vacation, then you can even customize it by adding an image to represent your trip. The app allows you to switch your currency from U.S. dollars to the currency of the country you’re going to, as well, so you know exactly how much you’re spending. Aside from just being able to add in your expenses, this app allows you to classify your expenditures by cash or card, as well as by purchase type. And if these features aren’t fancy enough, you can also export your spending report to Excel or plain text to view later.
Like the previous app, you can’t classify your budget into categories. Also, you do have to get the premium version of the app in order to export your expenditure report.
Concur
(Android & iOS App)
User Rating: 4.5 Stars
Okay, one thing I will say about this app, is no, it’s not exactly for leisure travel, or for those of you going on vacation with your family and friends. However, this app is perfect for those of you who need to frequently travel for business. If you’re constantly on the move, meeting clients and going to conferences, hopefully the company is refunding or reimbursing you for your travel expenses. Concur allows you to keep track of all your expenses so your company is aware of how much you’re spending and how much they owe you when they reimburse you. A cool feature is you can upload expense reports right on the app for your supervisor to see.
Although I personally didn’t experience any issues with this app, many users have reported that uploading the expense reports can be a huge pain, either taking too long or not uploading at all. If you can live without the reporting and just want to track your business travel expenses, this app is definitely for you.
So there they are! A great selection of some of the top rated travel budget apps out there. My personal favorite for leisure travel would definitely be TrabeePocket, so check that one out first as you plan your next vacation. This list certainly isn’t exhaustive of all the travel apps available to you, so do your own research if none of these work for you. And as always, get insured before venturing off into the unknown!
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