How TripWise works out what a trip actually costs

Search a flight comparison site and the number changes every time you refresh the page. That is fine for booking a specific flight next Tuesday — it is useless for the question most people actually have first: can I afford this trip at all, roughly, before I start looking at dates?

TripWise answers that second question. Every estimate is worked out by a deterministic set of rules, not by an AI guessing a number — the same inputs always produce the same answer, and every rupee traces back to a rule you could write down on paper. Here is what actually goes into it.

Getting there and around

The biggest line item is usually getting to the destination. For most trips that means a round-trip flight fare for the reference route; for a trip where the road, rail, or a ferry genuinely makes more sense than flying — Bengaluru to Coorg, say, or Port Blair to Havelock Island — TripWise prices whichever mode you actually pick, not a flight that was never realistic in the first place. See how TripWise picks the mode of travel for the Coorg example in full.

Getting-there costs (and hotel rates) also carry a seasonal multiplier — a peak-season week costs more than a shoulder-season one, the same way it does in real life. Food, local transport day-to-day, and activities scale with the number of days and travellers instead, since those don't swing nearly as much with the calendar.

Staying and eating

Accommodation is priced per night at the travel style you picked — budget, comfortable, or premium — for the number of rooms your group actually needs, not a flat per-person guess. Food is a per-person, per-day figure at the same style, and local transport (autos, cabs, metro, the odd rented scooter) gets its own per-day line rather than being folded into anything else.

Activities and the honest buffer

Sightseeing, entry tickets and the odd paid experience are estimated per-person, per-day, from real prices in the curated destination data — not invented. On top of the whole subtotal, TripWise adds a flat 8% miscellaneous buffer: the coffee, the souvenir, the taxi that costs more than the app said it would. Every real trip has this cost; pretending it doesn't just makes the final bill a surprise.

What this is not

This is an estimate, clearly labelled as one everywhere it appears — a typical range, not a live quote. It will not match a specific flight or hotel booked on a specific date, and it isn't supposed to. What it will do consistently is tell you, honestly, whether a trip fits your budget before you spend an evening pricing flights for somewhere you can't actually afford yet.

Ready to see it against your own numbers? Tell TripWise what you can spend and it will work out which trips actually fit — including whether Coorg or the Andaman Islands are two of them.