Traveling is a lot of fun but can be expensive as well. To find out exactly how much we spent during our round the world trip we painstakingly keep track of all of our travel expenses and analyse them for you. In this post: our travel expenses in Singapore.

While many people treat Singapore as “just a stopover”, there are lots of things to do in this city state and it was definitely worth spending 5 days there. It is an expensive country but we managed to keep our expenses in check spending “only” $672.73 (€626.00) or an average of $67.24 (€62.60) per person per day. This chart shows you how that money was spent:

Average Spending Per Person Per Day

As you can see more than half of our budget went to accommodation. We did stay in a tiny hotel instead of a hostel, but unless you’re going for 20+ person dorm rooms in a bad location you’ll have to spend a lot on accommodation. Space is limited in Singapore.

It seems like we did a lot of activities in Singapore, but it’s basically only Universal Studios Singapore that’s responsible for this cost. Apart from that we just explored the city by foot, MRT and bus to take in the various free sights.

The transportation costs include 1 Uber ride from the airport (because we arrived after midnight) but the easiest way to get around is using the public transport. It’s pretty inexpensive as well. We did not use a tourist pass but just paid for individual rides. In the end we spent less than the tourist pass would have cost, so that was a good decision.

Another large chunk of the expense pie is Food & Drinks:

Average Spending PPPD for Food & Drinks

Breakfast was not included at our hotel, so to save some money on breakfast we just bought snacks in the supermarket and went for lunch a bit earlier. You can further cut back your food expenses by eating in hawker centres instead of restaurants. That didn’t stop us from splurging once or twice.

If you’re on a budget just stick to food courts though:

Average Cost Per Person Per Meal

The price per meal is less than half of what you’d pay at a restaurant, while the food was really good in the hawker centres as well! Or at least in the ones we’ve tried.

Analyzing our travel expenses in Singapore one can conclude that it’s definitely possible to do Singapore on a budget. Stick to the plenty of free sights, eat at hawker centres and use the public transport. Only your accommodation will be expensive then, but can be pretty basic as you’ll spend most of your time exploring this beautiful city.