8 best travel budget apps for your next vacation

With so many travel budget apps out there, you might be wondering which one to get. It really comes down to your travel style and needs. Are you traveling solo or with a group? Do you need a simple budget tracker, or do you want planning tools? Even if you’re using Bankrate’s picks for best travel credit cards to offset some of the costs, it’s important to set a budget for your travel expenses.

Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your vacation spending with one of our picks for the best travel budget apps can help you avoid overspending and even split expenses equally between your travel partners. Find out which travel budget apps you should be using for your next trip.

Work travel budget apps

Expensify

Managing expenses when you’re traveling for work can be challenging. Expensify lets you track your travel expenses easily. Instead of ransacking your luggage for that missing dinner receipt, just snap a picture of it with the Smart Scan feature and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.

If you’re tracking expenses for tax purposes, Expensify offers several handy tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your eligible mileage for you, so you don’t have to enter it manually. This work travel budget app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering time worked for billing purposes.

Sign-up is super easy. All you have to do is provide your email address to set up an Expensify account. You can start using the app immediately, which is free for most users. The free version allows you to send and receive money, split bills and chat with coworkers.

A “Collect” account, which includes accounting and payroll tools, costs $5 per month. Meanwhile, a “Control” account costs $9 per month and allows for multiple approvers, setting expense policies and custom reporting tools. You can get a seven-day free trial of the Collect and Control memberships when you sign up.

Bankrate insight

If you use Expensify regularly for work travel, look into the Expensify Card*, which simplifies the process of importing business transactions. You can also import card transactions into Expensify directly.

SAP Concur

If you’re a seasoned business traveler, you may already be familiar with the SAP Concur suite (used by Bankrate’s parent company, Red Ventures). If you’re not, get ready to meet one of the most robust, full-featured business travel solutions available today.

Within the SAP Concur suite, you’ll find separate modules for managing travel plans and submitting reimbursement requests for travel-related expenses. Concur ExpenseIt app for travel expenses makes it easy to take pictures of your paper receipts and automatically categorize them to submit as expense reports. Meanwhile, Concur Travel lets you book your own business travel or make arrangements with your company’s preselected airline carriers, hotels and other providers.

SAP Concur offers travel management solutions for organizations of all sizes — from small businesses to enterprise leaders. Business owners and managers can try Concur Expense and Concur Travel for free. Individual users who have access to these tools through their employer can download the iOS or Google Play app to get started.

Solo travel budget apps

PocketGuard

PocketGuard markets itself as “everything you need to control your personal finances,” but it’s actually a handy vacation budget planner as well. That’s because the app uses the “in my pocket” feature to calculate how much disposable income you have available. You can then allocate this toward your travel budget.

All you have to do is provide your income and spending information. PocketGuard will calculate your disposable income accordingly. If you’re among the group of vacationers who are willing to go into debt to travel, then PocketGuard might be able to help with that too.

This impromptu travel budget app will recommend a strategy for paying off debt in the most efficient way. You can also use PocketGuard to set financial goals, save money and plan for future travel as a reward.

Download the iOS or Google Play version of the app and take advantage of a free seven-day trial. After that, the cost is $7.99 a month or $74.99 a year.

Trabee Pocket

The Trabee Pocket app provides travel budgeting and expense tracking in a user-friendly interface. The app allows you to set a vacation budget and then enter your expenses to track how much you’re spending in different categories.

When it comes to staying on budget, you only need to enter the amount you paid while on vacation and save it. The app shows you how much money you’ve spent and how much you have left. This feature helps you avoid overspending.

Features include:

• Automatic currency conversion to your home currency
• Easily record expenses with the calculator
• Separate cash and card expenses
• Attach photos and brief memos to expenses
• Categorize expenses
• View expenses by date
• Set a budget
• Record income

The app is free for basic features. For $2.99 a month, you can upgrade to pro, which includes the following features:

• Multi-currency support
• Customizable categories (icons, colors, order)
• Expense usage rate and pie chart by category
• Export to PDF, CSV files
• Daily expense total displayed in your home currency on the “All” screen

At the end of your trip, you can export your expense data to a PDF or CSV file for future budgeting or tax purposes. Overall, this is a solid vacation budget planner app if you’re looking for a free or paid option. Trabee is available on iOS and the Google Play store.

Wanderlog

This all-in-one app allows users to plan an itinerary, find lodging, import reservations and share information on group trips. This means you no longer have to go back and forth between different apps, tabs and tools to keep track of your travel plans — and everyone is on the same page.

One of the best features is the interactive map that allows you to add trip details, including flights, tourist sites, hotels and dining, with a single click. You can easily make changes and put your activities in order. It also gives you the best routes to get from point A to point B and beyond.

For each place on your map, you can see key info such as a description and picture of the place, average user ratings with links to reviews, opening hours, address, website and phone number. Information comes from top travel guides, lists from Google Trips and Google Travel and reviews from other Wanderlog users.

The free version of the app is pretty robust, with features including:

• Budgeting, expense tracking and splitting
• Collaboration with travel partners in real time
• Checklists for organization
• Personalized recommendations
• Find and book a hotel
• Import for flight and hotel reservations and track them
• Travel guides
• AI travel assistant for help with planning
• Group itineraries

The pro version of Wanderlog, at $39.99 a year, comes with offline access to trip plans, flight and car rental deals, unlimited attachments, the ability to export to Google Maps, route optimization, automatically scanning Gmail for trip details, unlimited AI assistance and adding places from anywhere on the web.

Find Wanderlog on iOS and Google Play.

Group travel budget apps

Splitwise

When you’re traveling with a group, it’s not always practical for each person to pay for their own expenses. Pulling out multiple credit cards to cover the group dinner bill is possible, but booking group tours and even airfare can be a hassle when done individually.

That’s where Splitwise comes in. The app lets users track shared expenses and the balance owed by each person. This transparency can make it much easier to determine who owes what at the end of a group trip. Frequent traveler and UX specialist Christian Castillo has used Splitwise across multiple group vacations to split expenses evenly with friends.

“The app makes it easy to input expenses as they occur, and I’m able to send it to the group that I’m traveling with all at once,” says Castillo. “So no miscommunication has been had because with ferry rides, dinners and excursions, we all agree to split the cost evenly.” He touts Splitwise’s ability to load expenses as you go and even scan receipts with the paid version of the app. One of the biggest advantages he shares is having everything on one platform.

The one downside Castillo shares about using the Splitwise app is the limited capability of the free version. “You do get capped on how many expenses you can input in one day unless you have the pro version.”

Splitwise Pro’s features include adding unlimited expenses, import transactions, currency conversion, charts and graphs, receipt scanning, itemization, expense search and default split settings.

Even without spending $4.99 per month on the pro version, this travel budget app is still highly useful. If you’re planning a group trip and need a way to split expenses without the hassle, simply download the free app, add group members and seamlessly settle up at the end of the trip.

Bankrate insight

Check out Splitwise’s “simplify debts” feature, which balances debts across group members to minimize the total number of payments needed to settle up. It doesn’t change the amount each person owes, but makes it easier to pay everyone back within the group.

Batch App

Planning bachelor or bachelorette parties is notoriously challenging on budget and group logistics. But the Batch app simplifies things with budgeting and planning tools designed to make planning parties and vacations less stressful. Users can budget, plan and book all activities for a dinner party, group trip, birthday or bachelorette party. You can even add your friends to the app to communicate and make planning decisions easier, as well as divide up expenses in the app.

While Batch is primarily marketed around bachelorette parties, you can use it to book any type of group activity in participating cities. Although you can do just about all of your trip planning through this app, this one doesn’t handle payments. It only helps track group expenses through its Ledger feature, so you can see who owes what. The Batch app is free to use, though there is a processing fee when you book events. Download the app on iOS or Google Play.

TravelSpend

In my own experience, one of the best travel budget apps is TravelSpend. It’s simple to use, automatically converts spending to your home currency and lets you add friends so you can track expenses together. Plus, it gives you a breakdown of which categories you’re doing most of your spending in. I recently used it to track expenses on a trip to Toronto, and it helped me stay within my budget.

It took no time at all to enter my spending as it occurred, and it was immediately deducted from my set budget for the trip. At a glance, I could see how much I had left to spend. It was also nice to see what categories I did most of my spending in which would come in handy for those using a rotating category credit card.

You can also export your spending to a CSV or Excel file to integrate it with your other budgeting methods. With the premium version, which costs $4.99 per month, you get added functionality such as:

• Creating custom categories
• Attaching GPS locations to your costs
• Adding income
• Creating your own exchange rate
• Seeing and settling debts

Even without the added features of the premium version, using TravelSpend for free is powerful on its own. The primary drawback is that even though you can track shared expenses, there are no payment integrations within the app. So you’ll have to switch over to Venmo, Paypal or Zelle once it’s time to settle up, and then switch back to TravelSpend to mark the debts as paid.

The app is available on iOS and Google Play.

The bottom line

Having a travel budget app is more important than ever. Sticking to a budget at home can be challenging in itself, but once you add the thrill of a vacation, budgeting can quickly snowball if you don’t have the right tools or apps to help you reign it in. By using one of the best travel budget apps, you can stay on budget, cut down on unnecessary expenses and plan your travels more efficiently.

Need more help with travel planning? Check out Bankrate’s travel tool kit for tips and insights on how to boost your savings for travel, maximize points and miles, simplify the booking process and more.

*The information about the Expensify Card has been collected independently by Bankrate.com. The card details have not been reviewed or approved by the issuer.