I've recently come back from a career break. During which I travelled around Asia with my fiance. Planning such a long trip can be quite daunting at first. So here's how I did it.

We were in Asia for 5 months, but I'd say planning a trip that's 1 or 2 months long is probably the same as planning a trip that's 5 months long. (With the exception of needing to also plan around seasonal weather). The first thing to figure out is how much you're willing to spend.

Total Spend

Your total spend should include flights, cost of taxis, and meals and nights outs. As an example let's imagine the most we are willing to spend on a two month trip (if we were to really dish out) is about ~£9,000. Remember this is a two person trip. So given that we can spend £9,000 on this trip how long can we go for?

Cost Per Month

It's roughly estimated from rent £1,400-£2,000 and monthly living expenses ~£1,500. Plus a return flight on the high end ~£1,000.

For a long trip you only need one flight, so you can average that cost of travel across the two months. In our case the largest flight cost was to Japan from London and back. Looking at it now I see this cost us £1087.

This is where we would divide the budget across the two months; giving us a rough monthly spend of £3,500. If we are going for two months that gives us £2,000 on flights.

Cost Per Night

We need to keep in mind how many days are in each month, March is 31 days and April is 30 days. We break our budget into a table and set a goal of spending £1,200 a month on accommodation.

From the table above you can notice that our cost per night for the hotel is actually slightly higher in April because it's one day less than March.

Now there's a goal to aim for when booking hotels. We booked all the hotels 6 months in advance. In some cases the hotels hadn't setup their availability in their calendar system since we were thinking further ahead than they were.

We would look up the price of the hotel again when we were at the hotel and found that in cases we saved money, we saved £50-£200. And when we overpaid we overpaid by £2-8. So overall advance bookings turned out well for us.

The actually cost for us per night in Japan ended up being £55.21 in March. (We did go skiing for 2 weeks) and £47.13 in April So we blew the budget but the following month we spent £33.01 and then £30.02 so we clawed it back. There's also no reason to say you can't spend a little bit more on accommodation but this just means you'll need to spend less on other things like meals and capsule toys.

Because our spend was £55 this meant our "food/other" budget was about £61 per day. Also keep in mind I'm trying on purpose to over budget. Having this £61 concrete meant I could keep a rough idea of how much we should cap our spend each day. £61 does end up being quite a bit of money, especially if you're making breakfasts at home and you're not eating at fancy restaurants every night.

But we also have to note that that £61 also includes metro/bus tickets, souvenirs and entrance to theatres/museums. This forced us to diversify what experiences we were having. Walking and exploring Tokyo is more affordable than seeing kabuki every night.

Tracking

Keeping track of all the costs is really important. Consider how many hotels and flights we had to book. I also had to make sure every night was accounted for so we weren't left scrabbling for a place to stay at the last minute.

I had two spreadsheets for this. The first was a "per day" accommodation spend where I listed the months of travel at the top and the day of the month on the left.

This way I knew that, if there were gaps in this table, there were nights that were not accounted for. E.g. In the table above I need to book a hotel for the night of the 2nd and 3rd.

My second spreadsheet kept track of realised costs. A large table containing everything I've paid for, the date I paid, the number of nights, the start and end. In some cases we had to pay on arrival. I had a column which indicated if it was accommodation or travel and lastly notes which indicated if we should expect breakfast or dinner or both. So I'd make a payment, I'd then fill in the "per day" table so I knew where we were going to be and when.

In some cases we needed to note down on a certain day that we should prepare food the night before since we were catching a train which would not include a lunch and you'll want to avoid having to buy food at a station or while on a train as these will have an added margin on the cost that I wanted to avoid.

Conclusion

Planning a big trip can seem quite overwhelming at first, but once you break it down and you know where you're likely to be it's a matter of filling in the pieces. We started with Skiing then went to Tokyo and then did the Nakasendō trail between Kyoto and Tokyo. Making our trip as adventurous as we can. We gave ourself generous amounts of time to get across the town so we never missed a flight or train. It's better to need to waste time exploring shops and stations than miss a train you'd paid for.

We had the whole trip sorted out by the time we set foot in Japan so from then it was just a matter of enjoying ourselves and following the little reminders we'd set 6 months ago.

I'd say the best part was being able to forget what we'd booked half a year prior since it made for a pleasant surprise when we arrived and I had a reminder saying "the accommodation is taking care of breakfast and dinner so don't worry about finding food."