Vacation Planning Cost Analysis Spreadsheet?

[adelight]

Does anyone have a cost analysis spreadsheet already started? I would like to compare the cost of staying on property vs not, dining plan vs not, vs free dining with upgrade, renting a car vs not, etc. I'd like to have it all on one spreadsheet to reference and compare with total cost of the trip with the variables. TIA.

 

[damskipi13]

When I'm planning a vacation I will make a column for each "style" of trip and rows for categories such as hotel, transportation to/from Orlando, rental car, gas in Orlando, food, etc plus I have an "other" category for notes. Then I just compare the totals (objective) and the personal value of each style (subjective) and decide what to do. So for instance, I might have one column of "5nts-OnSite-Driving" and in that column I will have a 0 for rental car but my hotel amount would probably be high. Then other columns might say "7nts-OffSite-Flying" or "5nts-OffSite-Driving" etc and so on. I might find that staying offsite for 7 days costs the same as 5 days onsite. Or I'll decide to pay extra to fly because I don't want to spend 2 days in the car, even though it's cheaper.

Does that help?

 

[adelight]

I can totally make a spread sheet on my own. I was just hoping that someone already had it made. We're flying for sure since we live on the West Coast and it's for a WDW trip, so that's not a variable. And since I'm paying the same for airfare whether it's a 2 days trip or a 12 day trip, we're going to get our monies worth and do a 12-14 day trip, so length of stay is not a variable either. But we'd like to look at getting a condo on property vs a 4 bedroom house off property vs a Disney property suite (family of 6) and compare that when you factor in free dining vs paid dining vs cooking. And then there's renting a car if we're off property, and not if we're on property, or maybe we do rent a car while on property if we decide to cook. I was hoping to plug my data in and voila! Or at least be able to use someone else's spreadsheet as a starting point.

 

[Gumbo4x4]

Honestly, it's not that many things to calculate, but you have to remember nobody else's spreadsheet will be set up the way you'll want to see yours.

For example, we would never consider flying. So right off the bat, my sheet would (if I had one) would need to be tweaked for you. Setting up the spreadsheet should take minutes at most - gathering the data you need to enter will be the time suck IMO.