How Much Does a Trip to Colombia Cost?

Is Colombia an Expensive Country to Visit?

If a visit to Colombia is on your wish list, you’ll want to know how much money you’ll need to save for your trip. Is Colombia an expensive place to live and visit? Or can you expect an affordable trip due to a low cost of living? Obviously, it depends on where you’re coming from as to whether Colombia is an affordable place for you to visit.

However, if you’re coming from the United States or a country with a similar cost of living, you’ll find that the costs associated with vacationing in Colombia aren’t extreme, but they’re not bargain basement either. Colombia is a busy, modern country with its share of affluence and poverty, and experiencing the country as a tourist is possible on a very affordable budget.

Further, as with almost any locale, you can certainly take steps to reduce the overall cost of your Colombian vacation, as well as splurge on certain areas of your vacation. If you’re an American or someone living in a country with a similar cost of living, Colombia’s costs shouldn’t shock you, but having an understanding of the prices for common things can help you with your budgeting as you create your itinerary.

When I put together an itinerary, and before I’ve booked any flights, hotels, cars, or activities, I always add up all the expected costs for these activities so I have a good idea about how much I’ll be spending. One of the important parts of budgeting is all the little extra costs for things like food and tips, which can vary in cost depending on the country you’re visiting.

You’ll find it helpful to write down an itinerary that includes the times for those activities, their locations and the costs. With all that information recorded in a timeline style itinerary, you’ll have a really good idea for how much your travel will cost. When you have all the costs recorded, you can also move things around or switch things up to reduce or increase your budget, depending on how much you want to spend overall.

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What’s the Most Expensive Part of Travel to Colombia?

When I put my itinerary together, the most expensive part of my travel to Colombia was the plane tickets, but that’s because I splurged on lay-flat seats for an overnight flight. But even if I hadn’t, the flights still would have been a substantial portion of the overall budget. The price of your tickets will usually depend on where you’re flying from and whether you have access to a nearby major airport or whether you’ll need to use a small regional airport.

As far as flights inside of Colombia, I found the prices for little jumpers between Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena quite affordable, so it’s just the major flights into and out of the country that you might find on the expensive side. However, if you book your international tickets early, you can definitely save some serious money on the cost. I always try to book as far in advance as possible because flights are almost always cheaper.

As far as lodging goes, the rates are on the less expensive side when compared to American prices for similar hotels. We stayed in a very nice establishment in Cartagena that was a little over $200 a night. A comparable hotel in the United States would have easily cost around $500 a night. The hotel we stayed in for our days in Medellin was less expensive – around $100 a night – but the quality of it would have equaled about $250 to $300 a night in a similar American hotel.

The meals portion of our itinerary was also less expensive than you’d find in America, but bear in mind that a lot of what we ate was from little holes in the wall because we were always searching for “authentic” culinary experiences. I wouldn’t characterize my traveling partner and myself as true foodies, but we do enjoy eating like locals as much as we can when we travel. That often means inexpensive meals.

You can certainly find fine dining establishments in Colombia, but even the nicer establishments we visited didn’t cost nearly what they would have in the United States. Speaking in dollars, I’d say a nice lunch might cost $20 for two, and a nice dinner would cost around $35. As far as breakfast goes, we always ate at our hotels or had snacks before heading out for a guided tour, so our costs there were included in our hotel bills for the most part.

Seeing Colombia on a Budget

Colombia is a very affordable country overall, and with minimal effort, you can definitely travel on a small budget. The easiest way to get cheap flights is to book them in advance and to use smaller companies for your airline travel. Most aggregate airfare websites will let you set a reminder or notification on a particular flight, which means you can wait for an email that will notify you that a flight is under an amount you set.

As far as lodging goes, the cheapest way to stay in Colombia will be in hostels, but even if you stay in a no-frills establishment, you can easily find stays that are less than $50 per night where you’ll get your own room and won’t need to share in a hostel-style situation. Don’t forget to check whether the hotel or motel offers a free breakfast and to include that in your itinerary.

As far as food is concerned, sticking to small establishments or street food carts (you’ll see them frequently in the larger cities) is the most affordable way to get your meals. If you’re unsure about where to eat or how much you might pay at a particular establishment, Google is pretty solid for finding good restaurants in a certain locale that meet your budget goals. They rate restaurants from one dollar sign ($) to four dollar signs ($$$$), so the least expensive will always have the single dollar sign.

Other expenses you’ll want to think about for your Colombia vacation include in-country transportation (like taxis, trains, and buses), tour fees, and entry costs for venues like museums and parks. From my experience, the best way to get from one major city to another is to take a small plane. The airports in the major cities are serviced by many small airlines, and tickets are usually well under $100.

For shorter trips, you’ll find that your feet or public transportation will usually work the best when you’re trying to spend as little as possible. The elevated train in Medellin is really nice for getting around town (it’s a relatively new structure), but other large cities like Cartagena and Bogota are a little complicated when it comes to public transport. For example, you’ll need to do your due diligence when trying to use the TransMilenio, which has a mild reputation for petty crime and theft. Colombia is a safe place for traveling, but only as long as you take the normal precautions that you would in any foreign country.

Enjoying the Finer Life in Colombia

If you’ve based your opinions about Colombia on what you’ve seen in movies and television, you probably assume most of the country is filled with little homes in the jungle, with the occasional palace built by someone involved in some illegal activity. In fact, Colombia is really quite like any other country, where you’ll find all sorts of diversity in the environment, people, and society.

If you focus on the major cities for your first trip to Colombia (many travelers will visit Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena for their first vacation), you can certainly find swanky hotels and fine dining establishments, should your tastes generally run toward the more expensive side. Do a search for “hotel and spa” in whatever city you’re visiting, and you’ll definitely find several hotels that will offer a lovely experience with gorgeous rooms and amenities.

You can also upgrade your travel options flying into and out of Colombia, as well as for all the travel you’ll do while inside the country. Business class seats are available on certain airlines that fly between major cities, and you can always book a luxury car for taxi rides in the city if you wish. If you venture out into the smaller towns around the country, however, you’ll generally see less luxurious options offered, but you’ll always find comfortable accommodations of some sort, as long as you’re in an area where the locals expect tourists.

My recommendation should you visit Colombia and want to stay in nice establishments is to consider booking a tour or exploring an area that’s outside the neighborhood of your luxury hotel or spa. Colombia’s cities and villages offer wonderful opportunities for exploration, whether that’s on foot, on horseback, or in a car with a guide. The best way to interact with the locals and get a real feel for the Colombian way of life and the country’s history is to see the sights with a local.

When we visited Cartagena, I went all out on the hotel and booked a really nice room in the Walled City of Cartagena (one of the historic districts). However, we didn’t just luxuriate in the blissfully air-conditioned hotel for our entire stay. I booked a morning tour of the Walled City with a local resident, and we got to walk around many of the streets around the city with fascinating stories on the area’s history. We even got some fun photo ops with people dressed up in traditional clothing. Yes, they’re just dressed up to get tips from the tourists but don’t shy away from the opportunity just because you don’t want to act like a tourist. Have fun!

What Should Your Budget Be When Visiting Colombia?

Now that we’ve discussed some of the details that will help you plan your itinerary to Colombia let’s talk about the price. Yes, prices change over time, and we can all expect prices to continue to rise due to inflation, but you can still take these costs that I list here to get a general idea about what you’ll be spending.

So, first, let’s talk flights. I flew on Avianca from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to El Dorado International Airport in Bogota, and we returned to Bogota for our return flight to LAX at the end of our vacation. The tickets were for a redeye flight that left in the evening and arrived in Bogota in the early morning hours, like 5 AM or so. I paid $400 for each ticket, but then I splurged at the last minute for a “lay flat” upgrade.

This added $400 per ticket. This definitely wasn’t something I planned at the start of budgeting my itinerary, but it was a really cool experience. We also took small regional airlines between each of the city airports we traveled to, and those tickets were very affordable, ranging from about $30 per person to $80.

For our lodgings, we stayed in three hotels in the cities of Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena. Our hotel in Bogota was pretty basic but lovely and cost around $100 a night. Our hotel in Medellin was what I would consider a luxury hotel and cost around $200 a night. The place we stayed in Cartagena was a 5-star hotel (hello splurge!) and cost between $250 and $300 a night. Overall, the cost of the hotels was about $1,350 for the entire trip.

Along the way, I booked taxis that took us from the airports to our hotels, and each of these bookings cost somewhere between $30 and $50. The taxis were actually a little expensive in Bogota and Medellin, in my opinion, based on what we paid for other parts of our trip (like food and such). The taxi in Cartagena, though, was really cheap – like $15 each way.

Our final significant costs were food and tours. For food, we paid anywhere from $15 to $35 for both of us to eat, excluding tips. The food was pretty affordable overall, and I’d estimate it cost us approximately $500 for the entire trip – and that’s eating out basically every meal for eight days. If you wanted, you could probably book hotels with kitchenettes and make your own food, but I didn’t do this because I wanted to eat as much local food as possible.

As for the guided tours, you obviously don’t need to book a single tour if you don’t want to, but I always go full steam ahead with tours because I want to spend time experiencing the country I’m visiting rather than spending my time with my face in a map. My tours were anywhere from $30 per person (like the walking tours) to $200 per person for the crazier stuff (we went paragliding outside Medellin).

So, overall, I definitely didn’t book a full “budget-friendly” trip to Colombia, but I didn’t go completely haywire either with the costs. The total investment was right around $6,000 for two travelers staying in Colombia for eight days. If you were so inclined, you could easily get this cost down to around $4,000 without sacrificing too much comfort. If you were really intent on the cheapest travel to Colombia, you could definitely get it down to around $2,500 (maybe even less if you went for hostels where you shared a room with strangers).

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