What this total covers, and what it leaves out
This multiplies a daily figure by the number of days and converts it at the mid-market reference rate. It therefore prices only the costs that scale with trip length: food, local transport, entry fees, incidental shopping. The costs that do not scale sit outside it entirely. Airfares, travel insurance, visas and any required vaccinations, airport transfers and baggage charges are the same for a long trip as a short one. So is the exchange cost of actually spending the money, which attaches to transactions rather than to days.
A worked example. A fourteen-day trip at an assumed 150 Australian dollars a day. Not a costing of any destination, just a round number. The variable half is 2,100 dollars. If flights, insurance and a visa come to a similar amount, then half the trip’s cost was never in this calculation, and trimming 20 dollars a day moves only 280 dollars of it.
The conclusion to draw is that a short trip costs far more per day than a long one, because the fixed half is spread over fewer days, and that adding days to a trip already booked is proportionally cheap. Price the fixed half as its own line and add it, rather than folding it into a per-day figure where it will be understated.
One per-transaction cost is worth knowing before departure, because it is the one most often assumed away. Accepting a terminal’s offer to bill you in Australian dollars does not necessarily avoid your own card’s foreign transaction fee: Moneysmart’s definition of an international transaction fee notes that it applies to transactions made with overseas-based merchants or financial institutions, and that “this fee may still be charged even if the transaction is in Australian dollars”. The conversion margin and the fee can therefore both land on the same purchase.
Longer read: Cash or card overseas: how to think about the split. Where cash is still necessary, where changing money costs the most, what airport and hotel exchange desks actually charge, and how to decide the split for a trip.
Planning a trip? The travel money pages cover what currency each country uses with the live AUD rate, and the travel card guide explains how to avoid the worst exchange margins. The four charges that can apply to a card transaction abroad, and which of them can be declined at the terminal, are set out in debit cards for overseas travel.