How Much the Royal Family Spends on Travel

Stacey Leasca
·2 min read

The British royal family is constantly on the move. Between the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Camilla, Prince William and Kate Middleton, and now to a lesser extent, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the royal family is a bunch of busy travel bees. And all that travel comes at a serious price.

According to a 2019 analysis by GoBankingRates, the royal family spent about $6 million on both personal and professional travel in 2017. And that number seems to only be growing.

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The most expensive trip on the list was Prince Charles and Camilla’s 2017 jaunt to Italy, Romania, and Austria. During the nine-day tour, the couple took several very expensive charter flights between Bucharest, Pisa, Naples, Rome, and Vienna. All that came to a cost of $203,609.

Next on the list was Prince William and Kate Middleton’s official Foreign and Commonwealth Office visit to India and Bhutan, which cost an estimated $129,187. According to GoBankingRates, the hefty bill was once again largely due to their transportation, which included flights from London to Delhi and back, along with charter flights to different destinations.

Two trips tied for third place on GoBankingRates’ list. One was a trip to Israel taken by Prince Charles, which cost $96,958. That visit was specifically to attend the funeral of former Israeli president Shimon Peres. However, this trip came with a bit of a personal bonus, as Prince Charles also visited the grave of his paternal grandmother while in Jerusalem, GoBankingRates reported.

Charles and Camilla rounded out the list with their trip to Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. That trip cost just over $96,000 as well. It, too, was costly, thanks to the chartered flights from Royal Air Force Brize Norton to Muscat, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and Bahrain.

If the above taught us all one thing, it’s that Charles and Camilla are the biggest spenders. As Travel + Leisure previously reported, the couple spent more than any other royal family member on travel in 2018, too. It was then that they racked up a bill of about $530,000 for their massive tour through the Caribbean. However, it seems as though they really got their money’s worth on that one, as the couple took part in more than 50 engagements on 10 different islands during their stay. It was also the first royal visit to Cuba.