This post is dedicated to the lovers of spreadsheets.
Seriously.
Because I love a good spreadsheet for planning and tracking! And I know some of you do, too.
Someone recently asked me how I was keeping up with all our plans. A spreadsheet, of course. With multiple worksheets.
A few years ago, our younger son introduced me to Google Sheets. For this trip, I am using Google Sheets to record our Budget and our Accommodations because I want to be able to access it while we're traveling. We have an old student edition of Microsoft Office (2007 for those who wondered) that I use Excel from for our household business, but it's on an old desktop that belonged to our younger son when he was in middle school. I don't foresee us hauling it just to access spreadsheets, and our newer laptop wants to use Microsoft 365 which my access to will end when I retire (work perk - Microsoft 365 for personal usage). So Google Sheets is a great solution in that it is accessible as long as we have an internet connection.
So let's get to the spreadsheet! The first worksheet is the Budget. We've followed Dave Ramsey's plan of giving every dollar a name and using a (virtual) envelope system for managing our money. And while this is important in every day life, it's especially important for a vacation like this one. So it has been intuitive to create a budget for the trip to cover the main categories of Lodging, Gas, Food, Attractions, Supplies, and the ever popular Other catch-all.
The spreadsheet includes some initial columns including the date of travel, the starting location, the ending location, and a column for notes about what we will be doing along the way, especially if there will be admission costs involved. For each category, I carefully calculated what I anticipated our expenses would be each day, and then added 10 percent to cover rises in prices. Here's some of the thought process which may be helpful to others when building a travel budget.
*Lodging: Once we had our itinerary figured out for what location we would be in each night, I researched hotels, bed and breakfasts, campgrounds, AirBnBs, national and state parks, and vacation rentals to see what options were available. We agreed to not make this trip a tour of Holiday Inn Expresses (although we have reservations at several), so websites such as TripAdvisor and Google Maps have proven to be good resources for finding accommodations. We also ordered materials from nearly every location's visitors bureau. So last year, I made a list of accommodations that met our criteria (no smoking, no pets besides service animals whenever possible, occasional access to laundry), and then started making dummy reservations. Dummy reservations are when you put in all the information such as dates, type of room, rate specials like AAA or Senior Discount, to get an idea of what the price would be. Because most places only book at less than a year out, we used similar 2023 dates to hit the seasonal prices for the spreadsheet. We put these values, which included tax (plus 10%) into the Lodging (budgeted) column of the spreadsheet, and next to it is a column Lodging (actual) where we are recording the actual amount we will spend as we are in the midst of making our actual reservations for 2024. With over half of our reservations made already, the plus-10% was pretty accurate in calculating what the expected rates would be. [Note: we do plan to re-shop some of the accommodations as the trip nears because there are times when rates go down or there are specials offered.]
Gas: This is where AAA TripTik and Google maps came in handy for planning the route from place to place and being able to see the approximate number of miles to be traveled. Our vehicle gets over 35 mpg on the highway, so we calculated the gas cost as if we will get 30 mpg and gas will cost $3.50/gallon (and then rounded up by 10%).
Food: Most of the places we will stay offer breakfast as part of the reservation, and we generally eat just one meal a day when traveling, so we calculated food expenses based on those parameters. There will be some places we stay where we can prepare meals in, and others where we may want to splurge (although we haven't identified those yet), so our food budget is averaging to $60/day. This is the one category we can adjust on the fly if we find we want/need to spend more in another area.
Attractions: This is where we budget for all admission tickets, entry fees, and parking passes Like the boat tours we want to do, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the ferry to Mackinac Island. We have a National Park Pass and we are looking into getting a Michigan State Park Pass (for non-residents) as we'll have a few opportunities to use it. We use our Florida State Parks pass routinely throughout the year.
Supplies: While we won't be roughing it, we do need to take some basic supplies with us or pick them up along the way. Things like laundry detergent, toiletries, snacks, and other things we don't bring along from home.
Other: I put the Other category in mostly as a buffer for whatever we haven't thought of that we'll want or need to spend money on while traveling. This is mostly for emergencies, better safe than sorry.
I told you I love a good spreadsheet! I built in conditional formatting and sums and averages so we can keep up with our progress along the way, I'm interested to see how well we do with staying on budget!
The Accommodations spreadsheet provides details about each night's lodging including the following columns which are self-explanatory. I wanted to keep them all in a single place so I can make sure that we haven't missed a night's reservation and find ourselves having to sleep in the car somewhere, and so we have the information handy should there be an issue with the reservations.
Date
Overnight City
Date Reservation Made
Confirmation Number
Lodging
Address
Phone Number
Cancellation Policy
Website Link
Notes
In addition to recording the information in the spreadsheet, I also have it recorded in a word document that I'll print before we go, and I've saved all the email confirmations as well as printed them for the road-trip binder. I love technology but I don't want to be so dependent on it that when it fails, I'm lost. [I have to give a shout-out to a younger friend/colleague who has a bigger love of travel planning than I do who gave me some ideas for organization. So M.A., thank you!]
~ Cindy D.