Country #1 is not off to a good start as far as spending goes. I’d say what we averaged per day in Egypt is more on par with “vacation spend” rather than “saved up to travel the world on a budget for a year spend”. That’s ok though we have the rest of the year to make it up…right?

We spent the first few days on our own, and the rest of our time on a group trip with EF Ultimate Break. They actually offered us a discount in exchange for posting about the trip on our (very small at the time) social media accounts. This was the first time we’ve had this kind of opportunity…how could we say no to that?

We quickly learned that group trips, discount or not, will always cost a good chunk more than if we were to travel on our own. For all group trips, you are paying for the convivence of having a company plan and book everything for you, guide/transport/wine/dine/house you during the trip, as well provide you with a group of really cool individuals to travel with. With Egypt specifically, we also had security come along with us the entire time. We loved our EF tour and appreciated not having to stress over the first leg of our world trip.

Egypt will be an outlier as far as these budget breakdowns go, not only because we already went way over budget, but because most of the costs are wrapped up in the single cost of the group trip. Since we can’t accurately break this out into food, lodging, transportation, activities, and 2 domestic flights within Egypt, the entire group trip will fall under “Activities”.

Some notes:

• Flights to Egypt were $906 total. We flew from CLT to JFK, and finally into Cairo. This was by far our highest single flight cost of the entire world trip.
• Again, largest category was the EF group trip. It’s also important to know, for those wondering about the cost of one of these, ours was lower than the regular price due to us having been able to work with them from a content standpoint!
• For the 3 nights we were in Cairo on our own, we spent $32/night for a hotel with a full view of the pyramids from the roof (and free breakfast!!). Hopefully this gives you a better idea of the cost of traveling Egypt if you were to forego the group tour.
• After 12 days our daily average is at $231/day which is almost double what we budgeted for the year

Everything we did while in Egypt can be found in our Egypt Itinerary.

Click here to see what we spent in Jordan.