How to Save Money on Food While Traveling

Have money will travel. That’s what it feels like somedays. That you have to be rich to enjoy traveling the world.

Thankfully, that’s very far from the truth. You can travel the world while saving money on food and other necessities.

You may not be able to do all the things, but you can do a lot on a small budget. Here’s proof: France. England. Scotland. Wales. Japan. 

We’ve taken our kids to five countries and each time fed them well on a limited food budget. Each trip was full of fun and challenges and foods we might not have ever tried if it weren’t for travel — and none of it put us into debt.

Eating on a budget when you’re not at home is absolutely possible as long as you’re willing to  strategize, prioritize, and learn some creative tricks.

What’s a good budget for food while traveling?

Before you set off on your next adventure, count the cost. A quick internet search can give you some estimates of what you can expect to pay for food at your destination. 

The search engine may give you a summary or you can drill down the costs yourself by looking up the menus of restaurants at your destination and pulling up the websites of the grocery stores in that area.

When I was studying in France years ago, Bryan and I drove all over western France and along the Mediterranean, enjoying great meals — on a budget. I think we allotted ourselves $10/person/day for all meals and we never went hungry.

On our trip to Great Britain with six kids in tow, we averaged $15/person/day for all meals. Considering the cost of inflation, that’s not too shabby! 

More recently, we spent $12/person/day in Japan, though this doesn’t include the kids’ money that they spent on food when they were off on their own. Since they were all 16+ I consider everyone eating with adult appetites.

Your mileage may vary. Our family is accommodating certain tastes and preferences that are unique to our family as well as one serious food allergy. 

Eating on a Budget While Traveling

We use a mix of these strategies for eating on a budget while traveling. It depends on the day, where we are, what options are available, how tired we are, how much time we have to be creative, and how our budget is trending. 

If we’ve been pinching pennies for many days in a row and our budget allows for it, we have no qualms about spending more on a luxurious meal.

These strategies will save money on food while you’re abroad:

Pack your own.

Pack food for your trip, whether that’s an in-state road trip or loading a carryon with snacks. Both will save you a bundle over convenience stores and airport restaurants.

Yes, it takes a little extra planning and effort, but it’s absolutely worth it! When I saw a box of graham crackers selling for $15 in Mammoth, I was more than convinced that saving on road trip food is more than worth the effort.

Packing salads and sandwiches for a day at the beach or taking freezer meals along on the journey when we’re traveling in state allows me still to have a vacation and do my own cooking. And make ahead camping meals can save the day!

Even for foreign travel, packing a few snacks for the plane helps stave off hunger and protects us from astronomical airport prices.

Whether I pack food or not, I always pack a picnic kit, including cutting boards, knife, dishwashing liquid and sponge, kitchen towel, etc. When possible I also pack or buy in country reusable plastic plates, cups, and bowls as well as a soft-sided cooler.

Once at our destination, we familiarize ourselves with grocery stores so we can pack a cooler or do grocery store picnics.

Cook your own.

If you can swing a kitchen at your destination, this can be a boon to your budget, but there are lots of ways that you can cook in a hotel room, even without a full kitchen. 

Consider these ways to make it work

• In domestic hotels, you’ll usually find a fridge and a microwave so it’s easy to bring a slow cooker or instant pot with you and prep lunch or dinner in your hotel room.
• In Hawaii, Bryan and I made our own instant oatmeal, coffee, and tea each morning and assembled grocery store picnics in the afternoon.
• I’m a huge fan of the condo vacation stateside. I often bring freezer meals and supplement with fresh cooked meals.
• During our time in France, we borrowed our friends’ apartment in the South of France and found a great apart-hotel in Paris. This meant we could grocery shop, cook most of our meals, and save a lot of coin.
• For our UK road trip, it made more financial sense to stay at a budget hotel and dine out more often than to pay extra for rental apartments. To offset the cost of breakfasts, we bought a toaster — my husband’s brilliant idea — so that we could cook our own breakfasts for just a few pounds a day. The hotel rooms were already stocked with hot water pots, coffee, tea, and sweeteners. We bought fruit, crumpets, bread, butter, honey, and jam at the grocery store and were able to pull together super cheap “continental breakfasts” with very little work.

Picnic from the grocery store.

Grocery shopping while traveling is a super fun hobby of mine. My husband might have groaned a few times when I said we needed to go to the store. It was just so fascinating to see what the store had to offer that was different from home! 

Admittedly, it took us much longer to shop, even when it was just the two of us, but I can’t help it that I love grocery stores, can I?

We shopped at a variety of stores in the UK, finding ALDI to be the best for price, places like Asda or Tesco the best for selection. I think we saw the inside of almost every chain in the UK; we even had lunch at Costco once.

At the grocery stores in France, we regularly stocked up on apples, clementines, melba toasts, crackers, cookies, and water bottles, grabbing baguette and croissant from the boulangerie. These, along with fresh cheese, meat, and yogurt — when we had access to a fridge to freeze water bottles for ice packs — served as great snacks and easy breakfasts and lunches. It was near impossible to find ice in France, but I did use some cheap frozen vegetables to pinch hit for coolant.

In Great Britain, it was much easier to find bagged ice at the store; the folks at Premier Inn were always very gracious in giving us free ice in the evening, so it was easier to keep a cooler filled with the basics. We kept to pretty much a similar grocery list, swapping digestives for the melba toast and throwing in more crisps than crackers for a snack. Our picnics were always very tasty.

We’ve done the same in Hawaii and in Japan, assembling snack foods and other cold items like cheese, crackers, fruit, yogurt, and lunch meat for grocery store picnics. Ekiben are special boxed meals prepared for train travel in Japan. They are quite beautiful!

Find go-to restaurants that work for your family and budget.

We don’t eat a ton of fast food when we’re home in California. However, fast food and take-out is almost unavoidable when you’re on the road. It’s a good idea to find the chains that work for eating on a budget while traveling.

You can find typical American chains overseas, such as KFC, McDonald’s, and Burger King. We even found Subway and Chipotle in London. While we wanted to have a more cultural experience, on both European trips, we indulged a few times at American chains because our options were slim and we’d all had our fill of apples and digestives/toasts. Honestly, they weren’t very good, though I do appreciate that a Big Mac tastes the same wherever you go.

It’s particularly good in Japan, just saying.

Pizza was eclectic in France, but our go-to for cheap dinners. Our preferred take-out in the UK was either the local fish and chips shop (SUPER CHEAP!) or when in the city, either Pret a Manger or Paul, both places that offer gourmet take-away at decent prices. Pret a Manger locations are easier to find than Paul, but both are delicious. For a little higher price point, Zizzi and Nando’s were favorites.

In Japan while the kids were more adventurous, Bryan and I indulged in a craft burger and beer tour, trying one in every city. It was amazing the range of flavors and differences we experienced. It was not like a burger at home! 

Street food is a great option for saving money and enjoying the culture. One of the highlights of our time in Kyoto was a small yakisoba stand where we watched them make our lunch right in front of us.

Costco food courts are a bargain everywhere you go, but the best one so far was Japan. Their combo pizza was next-level delicious!

Look for coupons and specials.

On our first trip to London in 2014, we splurged twice at Zizzi, an Italian-style chain restaurant. We paid a pretty penny back then thanks to a weak dollar, but those meals went down in FishFam history as some of the best we’d ever had.

Thanks to Zizzi’s online coupons — and a stronger dollar — we were able to work in Zizzi a lot more often on our trip. Except for a miserable experience at the Oxford location, Zizzi was delicious and consistently good.

Remember to check online deal sites for stateside restaurant deals and check in with Money Saving Expert and Smart Canucks to get the 411 on deals in the UK and Canada, respectively.

Be creative at sharing meals.

Sharing meals when possible is a great way to offset the cost of restaurant dining at the same time as allowing you to enjoy the local culture. You get a taste of something while filling up on more affordable options.

While most places offered a reasonably-priced kids’ meal and allowed our littles to have the beauty of choosing, some did not. In those instances, we ordered a taster or sharing plate (pictured just above) and split it between 2 or 3 kids.

Since adult portions were often bigger than I needed, I often passed half of mine to a ravenous teen boy. Extra hungry young men might have supplemented with apples and digestives back at the hotel!

Plan for the occasional splurge.

While we are bargain hunters and have no qualms about eating a picnic in the middle of a city park or making apples and glorified graham crackers into a meal, we also like to make room for the occasional splurge. Pinching pennies most of the time allows us the budget to do it.

Since the splurges are occasional they become more memorable.

Don’t forget the regional specialities!

Everyone is full of opinions as to how you should eat when traveling. Seriously. The comments on this post will tell you that someone will disagree with your choices. 

While we didn’t go by the internet rules for international dining — we ate fast food, we had Costco pizza, we ate Chipotle when we could have had another round of fish and chips — we did our best to hit the regional specialities while abroad.

My kids have had

• crepes and Creme Catalan on the Mediterranean
• Haggis – delicious, spicy meatloaf-like concoction at a Scottish pub
• Irn Bru – the national soda of Scotland that tastes like bubblegum. I think it’s gross; some of the kids loved it.
• Bubble and squeak – a potato and cabbage dish served at breakfast.
• Fish and chips WITH the malt vinegar – we caused quite a stir at several fish and chips shops because we didn’t order ours with the malt vinegar, prompting interesting discussions about the beauty of french fries and free samples from the owners so we could delight in the only way to eat them.
• Duck cooked on the rare side – the kids deemed this to have the texture of steak, but the flavor of chicken.
• Black pudding — Okay, only one kid tried it, but he ordered it several more times, so I guess he liked it.
• The full English — our kids LOVED this part of our hotel stays when breakfast was included.
• Sausage butties — soft white buns filled with sausage and onion, served from a little stand along the shores of Loch Lomond.
• Yakisoba – freshly made to order in Kyoto
• sea salt ice cream – amazingly delicious on a hot humid day in Tokyo
• fried chicken cartilage at a baseball game in Hiroshima
• okonomiyaki in both Hiroshima and Kyoto
• ekiben on the shinkansen bullet train

Eating on budget while traveling isn’t rocket science. It sometimes takes some sacrifice and some careful planning. Obviously, each trip has its different kind of budget, as does each family. 

Our experiences might not be those that you might choose. These strategies, however, can make eating on a budget while traveling something that you can do, no matter where you go and what money you have to work with.