12:23
We recently went on a 3 and 1/2 week road trip around both islands of New Zealand. And in this video, I'm going to give you a complete budget breakdown of all the accommodation, the travel costs, and all the activities we did on this trip. But before we get started, just to note, I was traveling with my wife Jamie. We were on our honeymoon, so a lot of the costs in terms of accommodation and travel were split between the two of us. And because it was our honeymoon, we were kind of splashing out a bit in a lot of places, especially in terms of activities. So throughout the video, I'll give you some options about how you can make your trip a lot cheaper. And if you saw last week's video where I broke down the
itinerary of the trip, I also gave suggestions for three different ideas of how to do a twoe trip in New Zealand. So I'm going to break down a budget for each of those as well. Oo. So let's begin with our trip. As I explained in other videos, the route we did around the North Island wasn't the most efficient because we were traveling there over Christmas. So, we had to factor in where we were going to spend Christmas Day and also the availability of the Hobbiton tool at that very busy time of year. So, I've of course corrected our itinerary into this, which is more applicable to how you might travel around New Zealand. And this is
the itinerary that I'm going to break down the budget for. And also, the idea of this video is just to give you ballpark figures to help you start planning and saving for your trip. The cost of your trip will fluctuate a lot depending on how many activities you do and what kind of accommodation you're going to stay in. I cannot stress how perfect this place is. So, let's look at accommodation first. We stay in a variety of places from host to Airbnbs and some nice hotels. Now, obviously that's a ton of information to have on screen at once in a video, but I do have lists of all this accommodation in the description of the video and there's affiliate links there as well. So, if
you do decide to book them with those links, doesn't cost you a penny extra, but it helps me out a little bit. So, please check them out. One thing to note with these costs though, I've priced them out at per person per night, but since I was traveling with my wife Jamie, so there was two of us, most of the rooms actually cost double that. So, like the Nami Hotel, I've put that down as 145 per person per night, but the actual room cost $290. So, the total we spent each on accommodation for the 23 days was just over $1,200, which works out at an average of about $55 per night. Now, for travel, we rented out a car for the entire trip from Oakland all the way down to Queenstown. And since it
was our honeymoon, we splashed out a bit on a nice SUV rather than just get the cheapest car we could possibly rent. And because we kept the same car from the top of the North Island down to the bottom of the South, we incurred quite a high one-way rental fee. Then we had the cost of the ferry from Wellington to Pikton, including taking the car on it. Plus, as a nice little treat, I upgraded us to the premium lounge, which was an adults only area that included food and drinks, including alcoholic drinks. Although, if you were the driver, they gave you a special wristband to make sure you didn't order too much. Now, there is a lot cheaper way to do your car rental around New Zealand. The reason we kept the same car for the
North and the South Island and incurred those extra fees was because we couldn't get the car we wanted for the dates we wanted. And that's cuz we were there at the peak of the peak season because we were there between Christmas and New Year. So New Zealand was not only full of loads of tourists. All the Kiwis were on the holidays and traveling round as well. So the cheaper way to do it is hire a car from Oakland to Wellington, drop the car from Wellington, get the ferry across, and then pick up a new car in Pikton and use that for your South Island leg. Which brings us on nicely to this video's sponsor, discovercars.com. And I've used them not only for our car rental in New Zealand, but many other countries as well. And
with Discover Cars, you can compare car rental deals from a wide range of suppliers when booking with them. So, let's look up Oakland to Wellington right here. If I search for a car for 10 days for that leg, and you've got a few options here starting at just under $300. And if I click on one of them, and you'll notice that even though I'm driving it from Oakland to Wellington, they're not charging me a one-way rental fee. And that's the North Island leg sorted. Let's look at the South Island to get a car from Pikton all the way down to Queenstown. And when you get off the Pikton Ferry, it's walking distance to the car rentals there. So, you don't have to worry about trying to get a taxi
from the ferry to the rental places or anything like that. And these are quite a lot more pricey than the North Island. You're looking around $1,200 for a car. But if I click through on one of them, you'll see that they're still not charging the one-way rental fee that we have to pay. So, if I keep the petrol costs the same, but the Pictton ferry, we're only paying for passenger tickets and not for the car to go on the ferry, then overall by splitting your car rentals between the two islands, the cost that you get is like half the price of what we paid. And a couple of the things to note about Discover Cars, they're rated 4.6 on Trust Pilot with over 200,000 reviews. And if you use this link, which is also in the
description, you'll get a discount off your first booking with them. Discover Cars. So, let's move on to activities. And this is what can really eat up your budget in New Zealand because every place you go to, there's so many different activities on offer. So, before you go to New Zealand, it's really worth doing some research into what activities you actually want to do. So, that allows you to save up and budget for them because I remember the first time I was there in 2006 doing the extreme budget backpacking. I was in all these amazing places and went, "Oh, that sounds fun. Can't afford to do it." Again, we were on a honeymoon, so we weren't holding back on everything we were going to do. A couple of more
expensive ones on this list are the Milford Sound Scenic Flight and the Doubtful Sound overnight cruise. You can see Milford Sound a lot cheaper if you just do a day trip there, either by driving there or taking a return coach trip from Queenstown. At Doubtful Sound, you can also do as a day trip, which is a lot cheaper than the overnight cruise, although it's nowhere near as good. This is worth the price of admission alone. This is just unbelievable. So, in total, we spent nearly $3,000 each on all the activities that we did in 3 and 1/2 weeks. So yeah, not cheap, but this is like the extreme version of going all out every day. You can bring this cost
down a lot by spending more of your days in your trip doing things like hiking, which is free. So let's add all those costs up. And this is based on using the cheaper car rental version where you have one car for the North Island and one for the South. And that gets you a total of $5,000 each for 3 and 1/2 weeks. Now, I haven't included spending money on things like drink and food because honestly, that's like how long is a piece of string. If you're just staying in host or in a camper van, you can self-cater for every single meal. Or you can go the other way and eat out for every meal, buy lots of wine, go out drinking, and your costs are going to skyrocket. Now, if you're going to be backpacking and just staying in dorm
rooms, the average cost for a bed in a dorm room is about $50 New Zealand per night. So, if I switch the accommodation, did that, I've immediately saved you $1,000 New Zealand for the trip. I will say though, if you're a first-time backpacker to New Zealand and you're sort of between the age of 18 and mid20s or even late 20s, then just get yourself in a Kiwi experience. It's a hop on hop off bus. They'll get you discounts on all the accommodation and all the activities. You'll make loads of friends. It's a hell of a time. I've done it twice when I was a lot younger and I can't recommend it enough. Okay, so that's how much our
expensive honeymoon cost in New Zealand over three and a half weeks. But what about those twoe itineraries I came up with in the itinerary video? So, this was based on the idea that it's your first time visiting New Zealand and you can only get 2 weeks annual leave, but you still really want to go. How can you squeeze in as many highlights as possible in that short space of time? So, the first version I came up with was flying into Oakland, looping around some of the main sites in the North Island, and then flying down to Christ Church, and then driving and working your way down to Queenstown. So, this is based on staying in the same accommodation that we did, hiring a car for the North
Island and a different one for the South Island, and doing the same activities that we did in those places. That'll bring you to a total cost of $3,200 each for the 2 weeks. If you're just going to stay in dorm rooms, that cost goes down by $500 each for the 2 weeks, giving you a total of $2,700. And again, if you want to make this cheaper, have a look into the activities you're going to do. The second twoe itinerary I came up with is similar to the first one in that you're starting in Oakland and looping around the highlights to the North Island, but rather than fly to Christ Church, you're just going to fly
straight down to Queenstown and do a few more of the activities around there. And so this costs $3,400 each for the 2 weeks. But that itinerary does include the Doubtful Sound overnight cruise, which does cost about $600 each. Again, if you switch that up to staying in dorm rooms, that's going to be about $2,800 each. And then the final twoe itinerary I came up with was just doing the South Island. And so you would fly in and out of Christ Church, hire out the car, and do a loop around the South Island. And the cost for this is a little more pricey just because there's a few more bigger activities included. And that works out $35,000 each for the 2 weeks. Once again, if you switch accommodation up to
just staying in dorms, you can knock $500 off the price. So, if I compare the cost of all three of those twoe itineraries, you can see they've turned out pretty similar to one another actually. And as I keep saying, these itineraries do include a lot of the high cost activities that are on offer in New Zealand. So, there are plenty of ways you can tweak your trip to get that cost down. So, that's it. Hopefully, you found this budget breakdown video useful. It'll help you start planning your first trip to New Zealand. If you haven't checked out our two-part documentary series yet of our road trip around both islands, then please go check that out straight after this video. Next week's video is going to be
a little bit of geeky fun as I'm just going to run down my top 10 Lord of the Rings film locations to go visit whilst you're in New Zealand. And then over the coming weeks, I've got a few short mini break videos to come out whilst I'm editing the next big documentary series, which was my trip to Sri Lanka in February. So, make sure you subscribe, like, turn on notifications, and all the rest of that. Once again, there's links to all the activities and accommodation from our trip in the description. Also, check out our Amazon store that we've launched where you can buy all of the travel kit and clothes that I use. And Jamie's even got a packing list on there as well. So, it should hopefully make
the shopping for your trip nice and easy. Anyway, Rosie said it's time for me to stop filming. So, I'll see you guys. See, I'll see you guys next time. Yeah. Heat.
