The following will be an accounting of my 2019 trip to Panama. If you’ve not read the blog, you can do so here. Or if you want a summary of the entire trip you can check that out here. It might provide some extra context to the costs below!
The Transportation ($429.49)
The Flight ($410.74)
The entire genesis of this trip came when we stumbled on a flight deal to Panama. Since none of us had been to Panama, these flights presented a tempting possibility. We booked through FlightHub and it ended up being $410.74 in total.
Getting Around ($75)
For the most part, our transportation within Panama City was with Uber. Either to get to and from the airport, or to the different areas around the city for our daily activities, the average cost of our Uber rides were a few dollars within the city and then about $20 or so between the city and the airport. Because we had several rides, I’m going to average our Uber rides out to around $75 total or $18.75 individually.
Total Transportation Costs
| Airfare | $410.74 |
| Uber | + $18.75 ($75 Total) |
| Total | = $429.49 |
Accommodations ($0)
One of the other reasons this trip was so appealing is I had an expiring 7-night Marriott certificate that I had redeemed a year ago. While this travel package is no longer being offered, I had mainly done it to get at some airline points and didn’t have a specific use for the certificate itself.
This trip presented a great opportunity for me to make use of the certificate and bring the cost of accommodations down for both me and my travelling companions. We ended up booking the AC Hotel Panama City which is pretty central and offers some great amenities. Because I initially was after the airline points this certificate felt more like a “throw in”. So I’m happy to mark the accommodation cost of this trip as $0.
Total Accommodation Costs
| AC Hotel Panama City | $0 |
| Total | = $0 |
Food and Beverage ($300)
Eating in Panama can be relatively cheap. We did a variety of fast food and nicer sit down places. We did one “fancier” brunch at the American Trader Hotel, and we visited Con Colon twice! But generally we were relatively conservative with our food, doing a variety of fast food, fish markets and even American chain restaurants. All in all, I would estimate that we spent around $50 a day over the course of our stay. This works out to be roughly $300 for our 6 full days in Panama
Miscellaneous Expenses ($226.75)
Miscellaneous Expenses make up a good chunk of our costs we did several activities that had a cost associated with it. The biggest activity expense was our day trip to San Blas, we booked this through Viator and it cost $734.18 for the four of us or $183.55 individually.
We also made visits to the Punta Culebra Nature Center and the Panama Canal. These cost $10.31 (CAD) and $12.89 (CAD) respectively.
We also rented bikes on the day we visited Punta Culebra, which cost around $20 per bike.
Altogether the miscellaneous costs comes out to $226.75
Totals
If you add everything up:
| Transportation | $429.49 |
| Accommodations | + $0 |
| Food & Beverage | + $300 |
| Miscellaneous | + $226.75 |
| Total | = $956.24 |
We get a grand total trip cost of $956.24. Averaging this out over 9 days we get $106.25 per day.
Hopefully if you’re still reading to this point you find this helpful! If there is extra information you’d like to know, or have suggestions on how this can be done better, please feel free to drop a comment below and let me know!