Family Travel Budget for Southeast Asia: The Whole Truth (and the Cost of Conditioner)

The daughters on their very first trip to Asia (Vietnam)

The first time our family visited southeast Asia our budget on the ground (so not including flights) was $1000 per week. We distributed this as $100/day with $300 left over for the week for transportation or recreation, and this was more than we needed for five people.

In our 2015-16 trip, as we are traveling for more than a year, we are tightening up the purse strings. So our family travel budget for Southeast Asia is $100/day and that is it.

For five of us.

In fact, so that we could save up enough money for our flights home, we spent about three months in Thailand on what we called “austerity mode.” This was $60/day (leaving us a surplus of $40/day to put toward the flights home).

The Fine Print (a.k.a. the Jelly Bean Budget )

Now, I often see travel bloggers who write about their budgets, and many seem pretty deceptive to me. For example, you might see a blogger claim to be on a $50/day budget. But read the fine print and you will find that the $50 budget only needs to cover jelly beans and toiletry items.

This is because they have other special budgets that aren’t included in that $50/day. You know, special budgets like food, lodging, and activities.

OK. I am exaggerating a bit here, but it is pretty common to find that bloggers only put food and lodging in their daily budget while many other daily expenses come from a separate budget, not counted in that $50/day.

Our Whole Truth: Our Family Travel Budget for Southeast Asia

Here is the whole truth for us:

We had $60/day for most of our time in Thailand (including our time in Mae La Oop, Mae Chaem, and Bangkok—including the Bangkok side trips to Amphawa and Kanchanaburi). We used $100/day for Singapore (where we did cheat by staying at a friend’s apartment—otherwise $100/day in Singapore would not have been possible), Malaysia (except for Borneo—see below), northern Thailand (including Chiang Khong, Pai, and Chiang Rai), and Laos.

The only extra money we had was the year’s Christmas and birthday gifts from the grandparents (for a total of about $1200 of which we only spent $200 during our time in southeast Asia).

We Cheated in Borneo

Borneo is where budgets go to die, but I really wanted to see orangutans. So, we put aside some extra money before we left home so we would have extra in Borneo.

If you are on a strict budget, you will probably want to skip Borneo.

Orangutan in Borneo, where budgets go to die

That’s Pretty Much It

$100 per day for five people plus a bonus $200. That covers everything we spent on the road: hotels, food, getting around, activities, souvenirs, hair conditioner (you have NO IDEA how much conditioner my daughters use—I am pretty sure they drink it!).

The only big expense not included in that is flights.

We also cheated a couple of times by using our Capital One Visa card to “purchase erase” travel items (this is a great credit card for travel. You get 2 “miles” for every dollar you spend on the card. 10,000 miles converts into $100. You then use the card for any travel related expenses, and you can erase them—we travel erased train tickets between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, for example).

How We Spend Our Money

Hotels

Our goal is to not spend more than $40 for hotel, and if we can get it for $30, even better. This can be tricky as my daughters are all old enough that hotel managers don’t just turn a blind eye to them. We often have to get two rooms, a double and a triple. Sometimes places have a large room, but often the cost of a large room is not much cheaper than the cost of a double and a triple.

Some places it is easy for us to keep our hotel bills down. Northern Thailand was great for this. We rarely paid more than $35 for fairly nice backpacker-style places. It was also generally possible in Laos, but only if we were willing to pound the pavement and bargain when we got to a new place. Malaysia was also surprisingly easy. Even in Kuala Lumpur, we were able to find a place we really liked within our budget.

Bangkok was the only really difficult place for us to keep in our budget. If you want to keep to about $35 for five people in Bangkok, you are limited to the Khao San Road area. We hate this area. We stayed there at the start of our trip but couldn’t stomach it when we returned at the end of our time in Thailand. So, we stayed in a hostel called Suk 11 (now permanently closed) and paid about $70 for a room that fit all five of us.

We also stayed at a friend’s wonderful apartment for just a few days . . . for free.

During the time we were on $60 per day in Bangkok we had a long-term lease on a two-bedroom apartment at CJ Court (which worked out to a little less than $20/night).

The key to cheap hotel happiness is simply to not book things ahead of time. We try to time our travel to show up in a new city as early as is practical. We also try to identify locations with dense clusters of backpacker hotels. The best thing to do then is to drop all the bags off with most of the group at a restaurant or café and have one person go from place to place looking for somewhere to stay.

We make sure to look at the rooms, checking the bed and bathroom especially, before we agree. Sometimes we bring a kid along to check the speed of the wifi in the lobby while my wife or I go check out the rooms.

The slower the season, the more you can bargain with hotel managers. In high season you are not going to get anyone to budge much off what they quote you. Otherwise, always ask for a discount. If you are staying for more than a few nights, bring that up while asking for a discount.

If you like a place and they won’t come down on the price, thank them and tell them you still want to look around a bit. Often, they will catch you before you are out of the lobby and offer a discount.

We found that included breakfasts in Vietnam were worth it. Not so much in the other southeast Asian countries we have visited.

Food

There are basically two tiers of food in southeast Asia: local style food and tourist food. If you want to eat pizza and burgers, it can cost you close to the same it will cost you at home. If you want noodle soup, rice and stir fry dishes, more noodle soup (served in a place that not only doesn’t have AC, it probably won’t have four walls), you will pay a LOT less.

We tend to eat 90% of the time in local places and 10% in tourist places. Our family of five could easily have a nice dinner on less than $7 eating local food and drinking water in Bangkok. If we wanted pizza and soda, it cost more like $25 (or more).

Some places are tricky to eat local. In Vang Vieng, Laos, we ate almost exclusively at tourist places because those were the only places convenient to where we were staying. But even at the tourist places, you will probably do better budget-wise by ordering local food than by eating pizzas (which unsurprisingly, are generally not very good pizzas).

Some places, such as Luang Prabang, we really wanted to eat all the yummy tourist/international food. In these places, we basically look at food as our main activity: we went to Luang Prabang to eat. So, we used almost our whole budget after we paid for our hotel for food (I say “almost” because I still had to buy lots and lots of conditioner).

Street food in Malaysia (and all of SE Asia) is delicious and often quite cheap.

Transportation

This can be a big one. We did what we could to save, such as taking overnight options when possible so we could put our hotel budget towards the transportation. Still, the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai costs a bit over $100 for my family. That meant we couldn’t take it out of one day’s budget. I would plan ahead for travel, taking a bit of money each day out of the daily budget to save up for travel days.

We also avoid taxis as much as possible. If we can walk somewhere, we walk. Is it 40 degrees Celsius outside? No matter, we will walk. Raining? We walk. Uphill? We walk. A tiger with a taste for human flesh is patrolling the streets between the hotel and the train station? Better walk quickly (but DON’T RUN! That just encourages them)!!!

Walking often doesn’t save too much money because taxis are often quite cheap, but we do it anyway for two reasons. First, we like to walk. You see more of wherever you are if you walk. And two, every little bit helps. Maybe we only saved $3 each time we skipped taking a songtaew (pickup truck taxi) in Chiang Mai. But we might skip 4-6 rides in a day. We would have tired feet at the end of the day, but now we have saved $12-$18 to put towards our next train trip.

In Bangkok, we would fight like crazy to get taxis that use their meters (not as much of a problem now, due to the Grab rideshare app). Taxi drivers hate to use their meters, because the meter will generally be less than a third of what you will pay even if you bargain hard. So, if a taxi driver won’t use his meter and you are on a budget, tell him to shove off and grab the next taxi. Once, right at Khao San Road, I went through more than a dozen before I found one that would use his meter. If you are in Bangkok for a 10-day vacation, it is probably not worth it to fight this fight. For long-term travelers, it is critical that you do.

Daughters 1 and 3 in the train sleeper berths, saving on hotel money

Activities

This is a tricky one for us. All activities cost us quite a bit as there are five of us (multiplying by five makes cheap stuff expensive). That said, while we generally say we travel to eat, we also want to do other stuff too. We have to save up for big activities. If we manage to spend $35 on a hotel, and we eat local food and get by for the day on $25 for food, and we walk everywhere we go so we don’t incur any transportation costs, that means we have a surplus of $40 for the day. String a few of those days together, and now we can go ziplining (in Laos where it is cheap)!

It might sound a little boring to some to only be able to engage in activities every three days or so, but we love just hanging out, walking around neighborhoods, sitting in parks, and hunting for great food.

One of our most important money savers is hard bargaining. Lots of the things we want to do entail hiring a driver to take us around for the day. If we are going to be in a town for five days, and we know we want to hire a driver for one of those days, we try to do it on day one. That way, if we can’t get the price we want we can walk away.

And we can mean it.

If we walk away and the driver doesn’t chase us down and offer a better deal, no problem. We can just try again tomorrow. If it is our last day in an area, we will have a harder time walking away and meaning it.

And I cannot emphasize just how effective the walk away technique is. It really works. Especially if you are in a place with lots of drivers (where if he doesn’t take you, he may not take anyone—that said, don’t take advantage of people. You will have more money than most of the drivers you will meet, so go for a good, but fair price).

But be careful if a driver agrees to a super low price, especially if he agrees easily. You will not get what you bargained for, and you will probably end up in his “cousin’s” shop getting a hard sell for some wicker furniture you wouldn’t be able to get home even if you wanted to buy it.

Depending on where it is, hiking is often free, although you usually need to arrange transportation

So How Have We Done?

Part of why we are on such a strict budget is because we are saving money to have a re-nest egg when we go home. So, we have a “buffer” in case of emergencies. We have been very good about leaving it alone, and we haven’t used it for strict travel at all. We have used some of this money to do things like buy spare hard drives (when I left mine on the train from Chiang Mai).

And I would strongly recommend that no one travel without access to an emergency stash.

All said, we have done remarkably well sticking to our budget. Living on $60/day for five people in Bangkok SUCKS, and I don’t recommend it. $100/day for five people in much of Southeast Asia is fairly tight, but it does work. At least, if you like just spending time in places and don’t need to be entertained by tours constantly.

I should also mention that neither my wife nor I drink alcohol, and doing so could quickly increase your budget (unless you are in Vietnam where it will only slowly increase your budget).

TIP: How I Physically Manage My Money

I have developed a system for how I manage my cash that is great for sticking to a budget.

Pro tip 1: use cash, not credit cards for your expenses. It is too easy to lose track of how much you have spent if you use credit cards. Cash . . . well you can see cash. You know when you are about to spend the last of the day’s budget.

Pro tip 2: don’t think about your daily budget in terms of your home currency. Think in terms of local currency. It will help.

I know what my daily budget is in the local currency. I will go to an ATM and take out about 5 days’ worth of money (NOTE: we have a Charles Schwab account that not only does not charge us for pulling cash from foreign ATMs, it will reimburse us for the fees that the foreign banks change us—super useful if you travel a lot).

I take the cash and I put it in a ziplock bag stashed . . . somewhere secret.

The cash compartment in the wallet I carry is divided into two sections. And yes . . . I carry a wallet everywhere except Rome—there I use a money belt. I will take one day’s cash and put it in the back section of the cash compartment in my wallet. At the end of the day, I take any money that has not been used, and I move it to the front section of the cash compartment.

The next day I will restock the back section with the new day’s money. I can pull from the surplus in the front section of the wallet if needed, or (if we have another frugal day) I can continue adding to the surplus.

Having my wallet split into the day’s cash, and the built up surplus is a great way to keep track not only of how we are doing on a specific day, but whether we have built up enough of a surplus to splurge on something.

If I am staying at a hotel where I pay cash when I leave, each day I take out the day’s hotel money and use a paperclip or a clothespin to keep it separate from the main stash of money.

I have found this method extremely effective and simple at keeping me on budget.

Final Thought

All said, travel is risk.

And sometimes, that risk is just whether you’ll come in under budget—or whether you will spend the rest of your life paying off the tab your kids ran up buying conditioner.

Because travel.

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Epilogue Note from Spring 2025

The budget described in this post came mostly from our travels is 2016-16. So things may be quite different now. However, I still go to Thailand at least once per year, and you can still do Thailand for about the same prices as in 2015. I have not been to the other countries in SE Asia for many years, so I can't comment on them