How much did it cost for three weeks in China?

We recently spent three weeks in four different regions of China. We arrived in Chengdu, then took the train to Xi'an, then flew to Zhangjiajie, then took the train to Guilin.

I won't include the cost of getting to and from China. That's useless information, because it depends on where you're coming from and going to! And this doesn't include our three days in Hong Kong.

First, accommodation. We stayed in mid range hotels. We booked most of them through trip.com, our new favorite hotel and transportation booking app. It works all over the world by the way, but is especially useful in China.

Breakfast is included in a lot of hotel options in China. It's more of a standard than not. We really like that. And, almost all hotels include laundry... either as a service, or do it yourself. We really like that too!

We stayed in the Hanshi museum Hotel in Chengdu near the Jinli Wuhou Temple.

Accommodation: We spent $865 CAD ($613 USD) staying 20 nights... and average of $43.25 CAD ($30.65 USD) per night. 

Next up, travel. We took two high speed trains, and one domestic flight. The first train we did 2nd class, the plane was economy (although we got a free upgrade to business class!), and the second train we did 1st class. The first train was four hours and cost $64 CAD ($45 USD) per person. The hour and a half flight cost $157 CAD ($111 USD) per person. And the second train was seven hours and cost $124 CAD ($88 USD) per person.

Transportation: So in total, we spent $690 CAD ($489 USD) on in country transportation.

Besides major forms of travel, there is also local buses and taxis. Oh, and most cities also have a very cheap and efficient metro (underground) system. Taxis are also really inexpensive by our standards, so we used them a lot. It's really easy though the Didi app, which works similar to Uber. 

Local transport: Over the entire three weeks, we spent a total of $116 CAD ($82 USD).

Of course China was a bit of a holiday for us, so we spent some money on entertainment. We went to a couple of fairly expensive national parks. We went and saw the pandas. We did the glass walkway and some viewpoints.

Ruth, on the glass walkway at Tianmen Mountain.

Entertainment: We spent a total of $331 CAD ($235 USD) keeping ourselves entertained. 

Okay, so all of this time, we still have to eat. As I said earlier, breakfast was included at all of our hotels, so that immediately makes our food costs a little lower than normal. We did buy some groceries, because we always had some snacks around... and it was cherry season so we bought a lot of cherries... they were so cheap and delicious!

Groceries: We spent $82 CAD ($58 USD) on snacks during the three weeks.

But we also had to have lunch and dinner in restaurants. We tried a wide variety of places, from street food markets to restaurants. The most we ever spent on one meal the entire time we were there was $32 CAD ($23 USD) for the two of us!

Meals out: We spent a total of $329 CAD ($233 USD) eating out for three weeks!

We didn't do much drinking in China, but we did still have to buy a corkscrew, and of course I tried a variety of Chinese beers. 

Alcohol: Including the corkscrew, we spent $78 CAD ($55 USD) on alcohol.

There were a couple of miscellaneous expenses, but they aren't really relevant to this report. We bought some clothing, but I'm doing this writeup so that you know about costs to travel China. The cost of our clothes is kind of irrelevant. 

Oh, another cost was internet. The hotels all had free WiFi, however a lot of international sites are blocked. If you have a VPN on your device, you should be fine, but really, the easiest way around this is to get an eSIM and activate it the day before you arrive in China. We ended up buying a 50GB package, and added another 20GB to it a few days before our time was up. It worked perfectly during our entire stay and we were never without service. China has an excellent cellular network!

Cellular Internet Access: Our total cost was $56 CAD ($40 USD). While we did buy 70GB worth of data, we used it as if it were unlimited and were still under the 70GB data limit.

We normally buy our eSIMS through BNESIM. Download the BNESIM app, apply code WS774M6V at checkout, and get a €3 discount on all eSIMs.

So, adding it all up, we spent a total of $2,547 CAD ($1,806 USD) for three weeks of touring China. That's an average of $127 CAD ($89 USD) per day for two people... hotels, meals, travel, and entertainment! 

Not bad, we think!

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