Budget Your Trip: How Much Money Do You Need?

Bryan Tighe, co-founder and CEO of Budget Your Trip is here today to tell us how exactly he helps travellers figure out the funds they’ll need to go on their dream adventures.Bryan is part of our Travel Massive LIVE chapter. We’ve put together some questions to ask Bryan exactly how he started Budget Your Trip and received some inspiring tips for our Travel Massive readers.

What inspired you to create this startup?

During a year-long trip around the world, my wife and I realized that it was hard to figure out how much everything would cost during our trip. Continuously on the move, we were tracking our own budget and in turn asking other travelers for a general idea of what prices were like in nearby cities and countries.

We found that published prices were not often accurate, or only listed specific places. In many countries, prices are negotiated. What we really wanted was the real cost of what others were spending.

Using our own meticulously detailed trip budget as a base, we decided to set up a site where other travelers could also track their expenses. Then, all of these financial records could be averaged and aggregated (anonymously, of course) so that everyone could find out the typical costs, as well as specific costs, of destinations around the world.

Thus, Budget Your Trip was born. Travelers can track their budgets to understand the details of their spending with charts and graphs. Over the years we’ve had tens of thousands of travelers contribute travel cost data for over 3,000 cities around the world!

How is your brand changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

Financial limitations are one of the largest barriers to travel. By providing information about travel costs, we empower travelers, especially those on a tight budget, to make better decisions about where and how to travel. Before any type of crowd-sourced information, all travelers had to rely on published information from the travel industry or the specific viewpoints of a guidebook author. With the Internet and mobile phones today, any traveler can become a source of information for any other traveler, and Budget Your Trip is part of this major transformation in the travel industry.

How has travel changed since your company entered the travel industry?

In the last 5 years, millions of consumers have shifted away from desktop computer usage to mobile devices when planning trips or making online purchases. This mobile-oriented movement will only grow as more companies adopt new technologies and target consumers on phones and other portable devices. Travellers need to make decisions without the hassle of using an Internet café or even a laptop computer from a hotel room. Any travel business, large or small, which can adapt to this shift in mobile technology will see an advantage over those that don’t, and consumers will only continue to benefit from these advances.

How will the way consumers travel change in the future?

Since we now live in an age of instant information where review sites showcase every restaurant in the world and independent travel bloggers find every nook and cranny of the earth, most “off the beaten path” destinations will soon be documented and photographed for the world to see. So, in the future, anyone planning a trip will know a lot more about their destination before they arrive. Instead of focusing on “exploring”, travel will then become about the new experiences that we can have in destinations that others have already scouted. Sure, there will always be places that are less visited than others, but more and more “off the beaten path” destinations will become the new “must see” attractions.

What is the most important experience that you had during your travels?

In 2009 we visited Syria. At one point we were leaving a historic area in the heat of the day and wanted some cool drinks. We entered a small shop that sold a little bit of everything to buy some refreshments. What was supposed to be a quick stop ended up becoming a lengthy conversation with the shop owner about our trip, where we were from, and life in different parts of the world. This conversation led to an invitation to lunch at his nearby home with his wife and 3-year-old son. They generously fed us some delicious homemade food while we had a great conversation for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

With Syria and the refugee crisis in the news so much lately, I think about them often. At this point we have no idea where that family may be living or even if they are still alive. They were just a single, generous family living in a small town caught up in a tragedy. Experiences like this have led me to want to travel more – to find more people in the world that are different from myself so that we can all learn from each other.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Bryan and Budget Your Trip on Travel Massive.