5 Days in Costa Rica Budget Breakdown

Here I am again, spilling the beans on how much I spend on my vacations.

Thank goodness, after Antigua and Miami – this one seems WAY more reasonable in pricing.

This upcoming Victoria Day long weekend, my parents and I are heading to Costa Rica! Yay. This will be country #45 for me, and I am super duper excited to get to visit this country, as well as being able to do it with my favourite people in the world.

Below is a photo of the budget breakdown I keep on my Excel spreadsheet:

Let us start with the flight.

There was a moment where Avianca Airlines had crazy deals for people flying from Toronto all over Central and South America. We were lucky enough to be able to grab this deal during that time. The cost of the roundtrip flight from Toronto to San Jose, per person, was $327.00 – with carry-on luggage. That is freaking insane to me. What a deal! We booked in February and that is usually ‘late’ for me to book anything, but sometimes these deals come up and you have to take advantage like we did.

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Immediately after booking the flight I got to working on a place to stay in San Jose. Luckily I had done so many itineraries to this city, that I actually had a couple of them saved for myself.

The place has two bedrooms, two bathrooms and this beautiful pool. Also, everyone in the reviews said the location is great so it was an easy choice.

Total cost was $438.85 – so per person it came to $146.28 for the 5-night stay. Now I know the title of this post is ‘5 Days in Costa Rica‘ and the math is NOT mathing. The reason I made the title that is because we land super late on the Thursday and take off super duper early on the Tuesday morning to come home. So I couldn’t really say that’s a 6-day trip you know?

If any of you are interested in this AirBnB, here is the link to it. On my follow-up recap of this trip I will let you know if it was worth it and location etc.

Also, we have a second stay during this trip.

No way we could visit Costa Rica and not go to a beach destination!

For one of the nights, we plan on going and doing a trip to Jaco Beach. I know there are plenty of awesome beach destinations in this country, but because we are there for such a short time, we went for the popular and closest one. From my research it is only about 90 minutes each way from San Jose to get there.

We booked a one-night stay at Selina Jaco for this.

The total for a night here was $155.45 – therefore per person it is $51.81 and that is totally cool with me because breakfast is included and it is beachfront. For a one-night getaway, this will be awesome.

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For this trip, hallelujah, NO TESTING IS REQUIRED. The layover in San Salvador doesn’t require it, the arrival in Costa Rica doesn’t and the return to Canada does not as well.

If you ever want to know testing requirements for whatever trip you have planned, make sure to check the Sherpa website. It is great because I can input that I am a Canadian citizen, fully vaccinated, traveling from where and to where + what my layover is. Then the website gives me a total breakdown of everything required for the trip. Fantastic. Such a big help.

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Now the final thing is spending money.

Usually I bring $500 USD on every trip I go to, but for such a short trip to a place where my currency isn’t trash? I only am counting $300CAD, which is 154,036CRC (Costa Rican Colon). Furthermore, I’m going with the bank of mom and dad, duh! I intend on capitalizing being an only child very much on this family excursion.

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The grand total for this trip to San Jose and Jaco, Costa Rica is $825.09 per person – I think that’s not so bad. I know I definitely could have found cheaper AirBnB’s in San Jose and likely a cheaper place in Jaco, but I’m traveling with my parents. I am not putting them in some of the shenanigans I end up in. No way. They deserve some comfort, and I still think the price worked out to be really good.

I’m really looking forward to this trip with them and I can’t wait to tell all of you how it went when I get back!

• Mirna