Spending a month in France can be the trip of a lifetime, but there are many things to do before you even get on the plane. If you are serious about going this summer, put on your Project-Manager hat! Don’t think of making an estimate as a nuisance—it’s a chance to experience the project “virtually” before you even leave home. A good estimate will leave you free to enjoy your vacation by minimizing the effects of being unprepared. Your estimate will include both budget and schedule planning. Even if you’ve never done this before, you can learn one step at a time and then you will also have a template for future trip planning. Let’s open a spreadsheet and get to work.
Getting Started with Your Estimate
Most trips have (at least) four distinct parts: signing up, getting there, being there, and returning home. Start your estimate spreadsheet with a column called “Item” (a good way to start a spreadsheet if you don’t have any better label). This is the brainstorming session; start listing everything you can think of that will be part of the trip. If you know anything about travel you already have many possible items to input, such as “make plane reservation,” “travel from Versailles to Paris,” “return rental car,” “visit Normandy Beaches,” and anything else you can think of.
Every item will have some properties associated with it, such as “date” (e.g. deadline for getting plane tickets), “number of days” (e.g. how many days it will take to drive from one city to the next), and “cost” (how much you will spend on that item). These properties will be columns in your spreadsheet, and each item will have one or many properties associated with it as you build your list. Hopefully you will have a long—if disorganized—list after your first brainstorming session.
Now it’s time to organize your estimate into manageable sections. The purpose of the category columns is to allow you to organize the items rows according to whatever system makes sense at the time. You may wish to be able to sort your estimate by date when you are making a schedule and sort by cost when you are preparing your budget. You might make separate columns for estimated cost and actual cost so you can track your budget while you are on your trip. The “columns” will help you organize the rows of “items.”
If you are completely new to spreadsheets you can find some helpful videos here.
Organizing Your List
Let’s assume you have started a spreadsheet list for your trip to France and have at least fifty separate items in the list. The first column you will create is a category column. The labels within that column can be “pre-trip,” “air transportation,” “lodging,” “dining,” “museums,” “local transportation,” “purchases,” “car rental,” and other categories you think might be useful for planning and tracking.
Go through your list of items and assign each one a category. Make sure you spell the labels in the columns consistently so that you can sort the spreadsheet accurately. You can add a column for cost and a column for date and add that information now (estimated) or later (confirmed). Sort your spreadsheet on the number of days column. If you think of items to add later, remember to update the sorting of the entire list.
Schedule
We’ll assume your trip is limited to three weeks. That is non-negotiable—your job requires you to return for an important meeting when the trip is over. You have twenty-one days, and there is a limit to how much time you can spend doing any single item and still have the total number of days add up to twenty-one.
Budget
The budget is more flexible. You may have an idea how much you can spend, but you are the only one who is actually paying the bills. You can spend more money than you have; many people have run up credit-card debt on a trip. However, most people do have a cap on what they want to spend, and would be in distress if the expenses exceed the budget by a significant amount.
There are some items in the budget that are fixed, such as the cost of the plane tickets. There are other items that are variable and have considerable leeway, such as the cost of dining. The important thing is to be realistic in your estimate. You can’t expect to spend “zero” for dining. Will you dine in nice restaurants? Will you buy sandwich supplies and make dinner in your hotel? Do you need to tip the same percentage in France that you do in your home country? You don’t know these answers yet, but you need to start somewhere. You can do some research and come back to update your spreadsheet as you find answers to your questions.
If you have a column for number of days you can put “30” after the item dining and make a new column for totaling things you can estimate by unit price. Give yourself a budget for each day of dining on the trip and multiply that by the number of days (such as $75/day times 21 days equals $1,575 in meal cost for the whole trip). You can also estimate the cost for lodging this way by looking up a few hotels, determining the daily rates, and multiplying that by 21 days as well. This technique may not be exact, but it will be much better than wild guesses or wishful thinking.
A Word About Wishful Thinking
If you REALLY want to justify going on the trip it’s tempting to underestimate costs (time and/or money). You put low amounts in your spreadsheet, decide you can afford the trip, and buy the plane tickets. Once you are there, everything is a fresh temptation. You’ve heard about the Moulin Rouge? Tickets are expensive, but it’s right there in front of you and you may never have another chance to see it… How about a cruise on the Seine? The weather is perfect and you can see SO MUCH from the boat!
If you have companions who are not paying their own way expect them to lobby for their choices as well. You don’t want to disappoint your spouse/daughter/boyfriend when they request an extra museum stop, do you? What if you are travelling with someone who is paying their own way, but they have much more expensive tastes than you do? Your budget for dining out could triple if you eat in a fine-dining establishment every single day even if your companion is paying for their own meals.
Another risk factor is lodging. Many of the places to stay in France (especially Paris) look cute but have much bigger drawbacks when you see them in person. They may be considerably smaller than they looked in the pictures online, or much farther away from the attractions you wish to see. You thought you could walk, but now you are tired and walking takes a lot of time. Ten days of taxi or Uber rides in Paris can add up.
The moral of the story? Be realistic before you go, and you will be much happier during and after the trip. Worrying about blowing your budget can make you dread every decision you make while you are there. Maybe you just have to acknowledge that you will spend thousands of dollars more than you thought when you first got the idea to go on this trip. Maybe you will wait an extra year before you take the plunge, especially if you expect to get a raise at work this year. Maybe it’s smarter not to go.
If your budget is tight but you think you can make it work, keep on planning. There are some things you can do to keep the costs and/or schedule under control. Consider these options before you leave, and they will facilitate your decisions while you are travelling. It’s not over until you actually get home.
Risk Management
Deciding how to manage risk is one of the components of making an estimate. One way to guard against major financial loss is getting travel insurance. However, this can be costly and does not benefit you unless you actually suffer a loss that is covered by the insurance. Whether it’s for a trip, driving a car, building a house, or running a business, there are many types of insurance available. Most people want to cover “catastrophic” loss, such as totaling your new car or having your house burn down. Other risks may not be worth insuring against.
Risk management is another area where making a comprehensive estimate in advance will help you discover, weigh, and decide on which options to pursue. Having a serious medical crisis on a trip to a foreign country could qualify as financially catastrophic, depending on where you are and the severity of the event. Medical coverage for travel could be worth the cost. You may have a different view of the value of trip insurance for the plane flights. The decision is yours, and typically needs to be made in advance of the trip. Having a line for “insurance” in your spreadsheet will keep you from forgetting about it until it’s too late.
Refining Your Estimate and Making Decisions
Once you have a significant list of “items” you can focus on specific sections. Start with the schedule. You know you are limited to 21 days. Be sure you have a line item for every “task” such as flying, driving, visiting museums, etc. In the “days” column put an estimate for each thing you want to do. Make a cell for the total and add the number of days, and see if the number is at or under 21. Be realistic. Allow for jet lag, waiting in lines, slow traffic, closed attractions (the Louvre is closed every Tuesday), and just being tired.
For this case study we will assume you are making a tour of France and renting a car to get from one place to the next. Be sure each stop on your trip is included in the spreadsheet list. You will fly to the south of France; there’s a decent airport in Marseille. You can pick up a rental car and drive to Avignon, which is a wonderful city to visit. You also want to see the Pont du Gard. It is only sixteen miles away and it is breathtaking. You will use Avignon as your base for these first days. Other possible destinations include Carcassonne, St. Jean de Luz on the Atlantic coast, Bordeaux, Mont St. Michel, the Normandy beaches, Versailles, and Paris.
You look at a map and verify the route. Be sure you have a row in your “items” list for the drive between each of these stops. Calculate the miles (or kilometers) between each stop and add the drive time in the “duration” column for each row. Add the appropriate number of days for your travel each way (getting to the airport, parking, security, waiting for departure, flying time, plane transfers, baggage pick-up, customs, rental car pick-up). You probably have allocated around eleven of your 21 days already. You now have ten days to spend in nine different locations. That won’t give you enough time to see any of them well. It’s time to do some “value engineering.”
Decreasing the Scope
Most projects begin with lofty ambitions and undergo cutbacks to meet the constraints of schedule, budget, or both. For a construction project this may mean cutting back on square footage or amenities. For a trip it may mean shortening the duration or limiting the number of stops.
At this point in our case study we choose between two options: Go to Avignon, see the city and the Pont du Gard, and then drive to Paris, or just skip seeing the south of France for this trip. You can play “what if” by changing the numbers in the “duration” column of the spreadsheet for each of these choices.
Since you will be making plane reservations, lodging reservations, and rental car reservations before you leave home you will need to make a decision soon. Lodging in Paris may be more expensive than anywhere else, but you’ll spend less time and money traveling if you skip the south of France for this trip. Make your decision and don’t look back—but look forward to planning your next trip!
Fine-Tuning Your Estimate
You have made some tough decisions—you will skip the south of France this time—but that DOES give you more time to spend in Paris, Versailles, and Normandy. You can save a version of your spreadsheet with the full tour listed so you have a starting point for planning the next trip. Then delete the rows with the items relating to the south of France, including drive times, lodging, the side trip to the Pont du Gard, and the flight to Marseille. You may be able to get a direct flight to Paris, which could save a day of travel time.
You still have 21 days of meals, lodging, museum visits, and driving to Normandy and Versailles—but you have plenty of time to allow for local tours, relaxing, finding a drugstore for something to treat your headache, walking in historical neighborhoods, and shopping. Decide if you are going to sign up for a bus tour to Versailles, take the train, or rent a car. Every task gets a line in the “items” column with the duration and cost listed. Include all the things you want to do in Paris as well. You may still need to eliminate some items due to time constraints, but you can do the research and update your estimate “guesses” with verified numbers. Watch the “total” cell at the bottom of each column to see how each change affects your estimate as it is updated.
Hopefully you have taken the advice to “be realistic” to heart, but it’s also smart to add a cushion for unexpected things that take extra time or cost more than you planned. When you are comfortable with your estimate you can make commitments, such as buying plane tickets, reserving lodging, and updating your travel wardrobe. Your careful planning will pay off, and you will have a wonderful time!