Some things are prepaid on my card, some will be cash, and one of the three has a card with no foreign transaction fee so he will end up paying for a lot of the meals. We are all fine about money but I have seen this go sour on a previous trip when nobody wrote anything down until the flight home. Looking for what actually worked for people, not a list of app names from a review site.
Simpler method that has survived four group trips here: one person pays for everything shared on a single card, everyone else transfers a fixed float to them at the start, and the payer sends a running note every couple of days. No app, no arguments, one bank statement as the source of truth at the end. It works because there is only one ledger, and because the no-fee card is the obvious payer, which in your case is already decided.
The float is what makes this work. Without it the payer is quietly lending a thousand pounds for two weeks.
Disagreeing with the single-payer approach slightly. It concentrates all the fraud risk, all the card-blocked-abroad risk and all the admin on one person, and if his card gets frozen on day two the whole system stops. Two payers alternating, both logging into the same app, has been more robust for us and it barely costs anything if both cards are reasonable on fees.
Splitting app, entered the same day, and agree one rule up front: everything gets logged in the currency it was spent in and settled once at the end. The thing that ruins these is people converting in their heads at different rates, so the totals never reconcile and someone feels short-changed. Check how your chosen app handles multiple currencies before the trip rather than on day four, because some convert at the rate on the day you enter it and some at settlement, and the difference over twelve days is real but small.
Logging in the original currency is the rule I was missing last time. We had three people doing mental conversion at three different rates.
And the person doing the arithmetic in their head is always the one who ends up feeling done out of twenty quid.
@nightbus_nina · 2w ago
Whatever tool you use, settle nightly rather than at the end. Ten minutes over a drink while everyone remembers what things were is completely different from reconstructing twelve days from receipts on the flight home, which is how the previous trip went wrong for you and for me.
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