Now that we’ve returned from Scandinavia – more to come on that soon! – we’re setting our sights on planning our upcoming anniversary trip. We try to get away every year, just the two of us, to celebrate. These are some of our recent ones:
- 2020 anniversary trip: Savannah, Georgia
- 2021 anniversary trip: San Francisco, California
- 2022 anniversary trip: Toronto, Canada
This encouraged me to actually log our expenses from our 2022 anniversary trip to Toronto, Canada. Because I flew directly from the vacation to a bachelorette party in Austin, Texas, our normal flow of checking in with the budget was messed up. That put me here, almost nine months later, with a pile of receipts on my vanity that I didn’t want to toss.
So this weekend, we handled it! We dug deep into our credit card statements, and I was finally able to recycle the receipts. Here’s how our costs broke down, and approximately what we’d plan to budget for our 2023 anniversary trip.
Hotel: $822
We stayed at Ode Toronto for all five nights of our trip, and I would absolutely go back. It’s family-owned, and it honestly felt like staying in an upscale Airbnb. Our “host” was quite friendly and showed us around upon check-in, then continued to make sure our stay was excellent. We were conveniently located for public transit, but we also had a great patio to enjoy when hanging out at the hotel.
Flights: $735
This is definitely more than we’d usually spend on flights to Toronto at $368 per person – we paid less per person to go to Spain last year! That being said, we didn’t have as much flexibility on the timing, since we wanted to be there for our anniversary, and I was flying to a bachelorette party right after. This also impacted our ticket costs, as I had to book a multi-leg ticket, allowing me to fly to Toronto from Tampa, but then fly to Austin from Toronto.
Food: $638
Food in Toronto is expensive! This also isn’t an area where we tried to budget further, which can be done by buying groceries and cooking in your hotel. Instead, we ate outside the room for snacks and meals throughout the day. We found that our main meals averaged about $60 USD, though Viaggio, our best meal of the trip, did cost us $83. When we’re on vacation, we definitely like to eat well, so going out is something we consider as part of our budget.
Niagara Falls Tour: $230
I wouldn’t say this is required for a trip to Toronto, but we loved getting to see Niagara Falls for the first time. Tours can obviously fluctuate in terms of costs, and if this is something you want to do, you can probably find cheaper. That being said, we were very happy with the stops ours made – more information on how we picked it here – and so we felt the cost was very much worth it. This includes the CAD tip we gave at the end!
Transportation: $167
It took us a minute to figure out the best way to manage public transit, but once we picked up our PRESTO all-day tickets from Shoppers Drug Mart, we had a much easier (and more convenient) time getting around. This is definitely something I recommend looking into ahead of a trip to Toronto! We also purchased a Lyft to get us to and from the Toronto airport for ease, and paid to park at the airport in Tampa.
Add in $29 spent on miscellaneous items, and our total comes to $2,621 for the 5-day trip. Could we have done it cheaper? Definitely. But based on our time constraints, and the fact that it was a celebratory trip, we’re happy with where things netted out. Now to start planning 2023…
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