01
Start with two city-level inputs
Hostel dorm price
A representative budget dorm-bed price for the city, based on Hostelworld
research in the LeavePrints source dataset. It is a planning benchmark,
not the price of a particular hostel on a particular night.
Living cost
A monthly non-accommodation cost-of-living baseline drawn from Numbeo-style
city data, then adapted for short-term backpacking rather than treated as a
live quote.
Our source sheet is maintained manually. Prices can move with season, events,
exchange rates and how far ahead you book, so LeavePrints deliberately presents
these as estimates.
02
Build the balanced daily estimate
We take the nightly hostel benchmark, convert the monthly living figure into a
daily amount, and add a small LeavePrints backpacker buffer of £100 per month.
Balanced / day
Hostel/night + (monthly living + £100) ÷ 30
The buffer keeps the estimate from pretending a bare local-living baseline captures
every small cost that crops up while travelling.
03
Adjust for how you travel
Balanced is the baseline. The other two styles are simple multipliers:
ShoestringBalanced × 0.72
BalancedBalanced × 1.00
ComfortableBalanced × 1.55
These are planning profiles, not promises. Two travellers with the same style can
still spend very differently.
04
Multiply by nights, then add transport
Each stop's daily estimate is multiplied by the number of nights you choose. Those
stay costs are added together across your route. Transport is different: you enter
it manually because LeavePrints does not pretend to know which bus, train, ferry or
flight you will actually book.
Stay cost
Daily estimate × nights
+
Transport
Your manual entries
=
Trip total
Your route estimate
Transport increases the trip total, but it is excluded from the “per day” stay
figure because a one-off flight or train ticket is not a daily living cost.
05
Convert currency for display
LeavePrints stores source costs in GBP. If you choose EUR, USD or AUD, the planner
converts the estimate using current GBP-based exchange rates from Frankfurter.
Rates are cached for up to six hours.
Saved trips keep the exchange-rate snapshot used when you saved them, so an old trip
does not suddenly change just because FX moved overnight.
06
Know what the number is — and isn't
LeavePrints is a planning tool. It does not separately price every meal, attraction,
night out, insurance policy, visa fee, seasonal event, local tax or booking surge.
It also does not guarantee hostel availability or a specific final spend.
Use the estimate to compare routes and set a realistic starting budget, then keep a
contingency for the trip you actually end up having.
Cost figures are estimates only. For the wider rules around using LeavePrints, see our
Terms of Use.