China Travel Cost Calculator: Price a Private Trip Line by Line
Pick your cities, your nights and your hotel class. This tool prices the private vehicle, the guide, the intercity legs and the tickets at the rates we actually buy them at — then shows you a range instead of a single number nobody could stand behind.
A private, guided custom trip for two people costs roughly ¥29,200–44,600 (US$4,350–6,650) for nine days across Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai at four-star hotels — about US$242–370 per person per day, with everything in the list below included except your international flights.
The largest single line is not the hotel; it is the private vehicle, at about a third of the total. The car, the guide and the guide’s own travel together account for just under two-thirds of the whole bill, and every one of those three lines is bought once for the group rather than once per traveller. That is why six people on the same route at the same hotel class pay roughly 40% less per person per day than a couple does.
Send us the cities and the dates. We will come back with a fixed price, not a range.
Build your estimate
Same rates, both currenciesScroll the table sideways for both columns.
| Line | Basis | Low, CNY | High, CNY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total, whole group | – | – | |
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Permits before priceOne of the regions you picked needs a permit that is issued inside China before you travel. Tibet requires a Tibet Travel Permit, which only a licensed agency can lodge for you and which must reach you as a paper original; parts of Xinjiang need a border permit of their own. The estimate above covers ground arrangements only — permit handling fees and any regional permits are charged separately, at cost.
Above the published rate cardGroups of ten or more sit outside the card this tool is built on. At that size the vehicle, guide and hotel maths change shape completely — a coach, or two vehicles running the same route, usually beats every combination above — so a number generated here would be a guess dressed up as an estimate. Send us the dates and we will build it by hand.
What is inside this estimate, and what is not
Almost every argument about what a China trip “should” cost comes down to two people comparing different things. So here is the full list. Anything in the left column is already in the number above; anything in the right column is not, and you should add it yourself before you decide anything.
- Hotel for one night fewer than your travel days, in as many rooms as you enter, at the class you pick
- A private vehicle and driver for each day of the trip, at the class you pick
- An English-speaking guide for the whole route
- The guide and driver’s own rooms and meals on any night spent away from their base city
- Airport pickup on arrival and drop-off on departure
- Intercity travel by high-speed rail in second class, or by domestic flight in economy
- Paid attraction tickets for the number of sites you entered
- Meals, at the level described further down
- International flights to and from China
- Visa fees, and the Tibet or Xinjiang permits, which are charged at cost with the receipt
- Travel insurance, which we require but do not sell
- Cable cars, boat rides, evening shows and photography sessions — priced separately because they are optional and vary enormously
- Personal spending: shopping, bars, spa, laundry
- Gratuities. Discretionary, and never expected
- Single supplement if you want a room to yourself rather than sharing
Why the guide’s own hotel appears as a separate line. It is the item most often left out of an online estimate and then discovered on the invoice. A guide who travels with you from Beijing to Xi’an to Shanghai needs a room in Xi’an and Shanghai too. We show it as its own line at roughly ¥400–600 per night for the guide and driver together, rather than burying it in a day rate where you cannot see it or question it.
The five lines behind almost every China trip cost
Everything a private trip costs lands in one of five buckets. The rate card below is ours — the prices we are quoted by hotels, transport companies and guides — not an average scraped from a booking site. All figures are in renminbi because that is the currency we settle in.
Per room, per night, across the whole range of city tiers and star ratings. This is the line people expect to dominate — and for a group of two it does not.
Per day, by vehicle class, for 8 hours and 100 km with the driver, fuel, tolls and parking included. The single biggest line on a two-person trip.
Per day for the whole group, not per person. The band runs from a junior local guide to a senior national-level guide with a specialist subject.
Per person, per leg, in second class on high-speed rail. Longer legs cost more per ticket but less per kilometre — Chinese rail pricing tapers on distance.
A paid attraction costs about ¥100–200 per person; a day of meals runs ¥110–260 per person. Both are small individually and add up quickly over a fortnight.
The guide and driver’s own room and meals on every night away from their base city. A real cost, and one that most online estimates leave out entirely.
Hotel rates by city tier and class
Hotel prices in China track the city far more than they track the star rating. A five-star room in Chengdu often costs less than a four-star in Shanghai, which is why this tool prices each city separately instead of applying one national rate.
Scroll the table sideways for every city tier.
| Class | Beijing · Shanghai · Guangzhou · Shenzhen | Xi’an · Chengdu · Kunming and other major cities | Guilin · Huangshan · Zhangjiajie | Lhasa · Urumqi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3-star | ¥400–650 | ¥240–450 | ¥220–380 | ¥340–630 |
| 4-star | ¥700–1,100 | ¥450–750 | ¥400–650 | ¥630–1,050 |
| 5-star | ¥1,500–3,000 | ¥1,000–2,000 | ¥800–1,600 | ¥1,400–2,800 |
Rates are for rooms we can book for foreign passport holders. Chinese hotels must register every foreign guest with the police within 24 hours of check-in, and not every property is set up to do it — a ¥200 room on a booking site is sometimes simply unavailable to you. Our card reflects the properties that are. Peak season and trade fairs push these figures up sharply; see the note on timing further down.
Vehicle classes and day rates
A charter is priced per vehicle per day, so the cost per person falls as the group grows. The half-day rate applies to intercity travel days, when you need a station transfer in each city rather than a full day of driving.
Scroll the table sideways for the half-day column.
| Class | Guests | Full day, 8h / 100 km | Half day, 4h / 50 km | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sedan or SUV | 1–3 | ¥1,000–1,180 | ¥650–770 | A couple, or two colleagues |
| Business MPV | 4–6 | ¥1,200–1,450 | ¥780–940 | Most families and small groups |
| Compact minibus | 7–9 | ¥1,300–1,580 | ¥850–1,030 | Two families travelling together |
Beyond 8 hours or 100 km the charter continues at an hourly and per-kilometre rate, and public holidays and the July–August high season add roughly 20–50% to these figures. Our estimate assumes a normal-season day and flags the uplift separately rather than hiding it in the rate.
Why this tool answers with a range, and not a number
Two travellers can both say “four-star hotels, nine days, Beijing–Xi’an–Shanghai” and still be twenty per cent apart, because the answer depends on which week they travel, whether a trade fair has taken every room in Shanghai, whether the guide is a junior local or a national-level specialist, and whether the vehicle they need is a sedan or a minibus.
A calculator that answers “¥31,470” is claiming a precision that nobody in this business actually has. The band above is not an error bar bolted onto a guess. It is the real buying range: the low figure is achievable in a normal week with everything booked well in advance, and the high figure is what the same trip costs when it lands on a peak date or a sold-out city. Your actual quote will sit somewhere inside it, and usually nearer the middle.
What this tool deliberately does not do. It does not apply a blanket discount to attraction tickets. Chinese attractions do discount — children under 1.2 metres and adults over 60 usually go free or half price, and students get half price with ID — but that depends on who is in your group, not on a flat percentage applied to everyone. It also does not add a hidden service margin to the published rates, and it does not quote a foreign-exchange spread as if it were a price. The renminbi figure is the price. The dollar figure is a conversion for readability at the rate printed beneath the table.
What actually moves the total
Most advice on China trip costs tells you to watch the hotel. For an independent traveller that is right. For a private, guided trip it is wrong, and the table below shows why. Both columns come straight out of the model the calculator runs, so you can reproduce them by moving the controls above.
First: how many people share the car and the guide
This is the single largest lever by a wide margin, and it is the one nobody mentions. The following figures are per person, per day, in US dollars, for the same nine-day route at the same hotel class, with two people sharing each room:
Scroll the table sideways for all three hotel classes.
| Group | 3-star | 4-star | 5-star |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 traveller, 1 room | US$379–569 | US$415–622 | US$510–845 |
| 2 travellers, 1 room | US$210–325 | US$228–351 | US$276–463 |
| 4 travellers, 2 rooms | US$144–231 | US$162–258 | US$210–369 |
| 6 travellers, 3 rooms | US$118–194 | US$135–220 | US$183–332 |
Read the middle row against the bottom row: doubling from two travellers to four cuts the cost per person per day by 26–29%, and going to six cuts it by 37–41%. Nothing about the service changes. The car and the guide simply get divided among more people. A single traveller pays the most per head for exactly the same reason, and it is the reason solo private tours look expensive.
Second: everything else, ranked
All figures are the whole-group total for the same nine-day, three-city reference trip for two people at four-star, and the percentage is measured against the base case of ¥29,173–44,582.
Scroll the table sideways for the per-person effect.
| Change | Group total, CNY | Versus base | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Go from two travellers to six | ¥49,830–80,754 | +71% | The bill rises, but per person it falls about 40%. The best value in this table. |
| Upgrade to five-star hotels | ¥34,907–58,048 | +20% | Real, but far less than most people expect from a two-step jump in hotel class. |
| Downgrade to three-star hotels | ¥27,013–41,382 | −7% | Cutting the hotel barely moves the total. It buys you less than you think. |
| Travel in peak season | ¥36,466–55,728 | +25% | Shifting your dates by three weeks is worth more than changing hotel class. |
| Drop the private vehicle | ¥19,213–32,547 | −34% | The single most expensive line. It is also the one that makes the trip a private trip. |
| Drop the guide | ¥20,573–30,782 | −29% | A driver-only trip is a real option in the big cities, where you can navigate yourself. |
| Cut two days | ¥23,100–35,475 | −21% | Days are a straight multiple. Every added day adds every line at once. |
The order here is the useful part. If the number is too high, the lever is dates and group size, not the hotel. A couple who move from a peak week to a shoulder week and invite two friends will pay less per person than a couple who keep their dates and drop two hotel stars.
Three worked examples, so you can check the maths
Abstract ranges are hard to argue with and hard to trust. These are three real trips we quote regularly, priced with the same model the calculator above runs. Every figure here can be reproduced by setting the controls to match.
Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai. Nine days, two travellers, one room, four-star, high-speed rail, private MPV, guide throughout, two paid attractions in each city.
That is ¥29,173–44,582 for the group, or about US$242–370 per person per day. The vehicle alone is a third of it. This is the itinerary most first-time visitors end up booking, and the one the 60-second answer at the top of this page is based on.
Identical four columns, with international-brand five-star hotels instead of four-star.
¥34,907–58,048, or US$289–481 per person per day. Moving up two hotel grades costs 20% more for the whole trip. People routinely expect this change to double the bill; it does not, because the hotel was never the biggest line to begin with.
Same cities and dates, three-star hotels, three rooms, compact minibus, guide throughout.
¥43,350–71,154 in total — 71% more than the couple pays — but only US$120–197 per person per day. Three times the people for under twice the money, because the car, the guide and the guide’s own travel are bought once for the group.
Put the three side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. Travelling as a couple at five-star costs roughly US$289–481 per person per day. Travelling as six at three-star costs US$120–197. The larger group in the cheaper hotels pays somewhere between half and a third per head for a trip that involves exactly the same driving, the same guiding and the same distances. If budget matters more to you than hotel thread count, this is the trade to make.
Two more routes we price constantly. A ten-day Kunming and Guilin trip for two at four-star, flying rather than taking the train, comes out at ¥27,744–42,325 (US$4,141–6,317). A seven-day Chengdu and Lhasa trip for two at four-star, taking the train in to acclimatise, comes out at ¥21,360–32,583 (US$3,188–4,863) — and that figure excludes the Tibet permit, which is charged separately at cost. Set the calculator to either route and you will get the same numbers.
Tibet, Xinjiang, and the two special administrative regions
Four places break the model above, and a calculator that quietly averaged them in would hand you a number you cannot act on.
Tibet: a permit first, a price second
No foreign passport holder can travel in the Tibet Autonomous Region independently. You need a Tibet Travel Permit, issued by the region’s tourism authority, and it cannot be applied for by an individual — only a licensed Tibetan travel agency can lodge the application, and only as part of a booked tour. That means a local guide and a private vehicle for the whole time you are there, whether you join a group or travel privately.
- Timing. Allow at least two to three weeks before departure. The application itself is quick once lodged, but it is issued in Tibet and the original document has to physically reach you in mainland China before you travel.
- You need the paper original. Rail and air staff check the permit before you board. A scan on your phone will not get you onto the train.
- Remote areas need more. Mount Kailash, Everest Base Camp and the border counties require additional permits, which take longer and are not always granted.
- The permit itself is free. Agencies charge a handling fee, which is what you pay for. It is not a government fee and we show it separately on your quote, at cost.
- Visa-free travellers can still go. If you enter China under a visa-free arrangement, you can apply for the permit without a visa, but your whole trip — Tibet included — must finish inside the visa-free window.
The example on this page flies or trains you in from Chengdu, which is the usual mainland gateway. Treat that Lhasa figure as the cost of the ground arrangements only: it excludes the permit handling fee and any additional regional permits.
Xinjiang: fewer restrictions, more checkpoints
Most of Xinjiang is open to foreign travellers without a special permit, and Urumqi prices much like a tier-two city. What changes is friction rather than cost. Hotels registered to accept foreign passports are clustered in the main cities, travel between cities takes longer than the map suggests, and parts of the south — the Pamir plateau, the border counties around Kashgar — need a border permit of their own. We price Xinjiang case by case rather than pretending the standard rate card applies.
Hong Kong, China and Macao, China
Both are separate jurisdictions. They use their own currencies, the Hong Kong dollar and the Macao pataca; they run their own immigration rules, which for many nationalities are more generous than the mainland’s; and a mainland visa or visa-free entry does not automatically cover them. Our mainland vehicle, guide and hotel rates do not extend across that boundary either. If your itinerary includes either, we quote that leg separately and tell you exactly which entry rule applies to your passport. That is why neither appears in the city list above — folding them into a mainland total would produce a number that is wrong in both directions.
What this page does not claim
- It is not a quote. It is a budget estimate built from our 2026 rate card. A quote is fixed, dated, and signed; this is a range to plan against.
- It does not cover international airfare. That is usually the single largest line on a China trip and it depends entirely on your departure city and how early you book. We do not sell it and we do not guess at it.
- It does not price every deviation. A private cooking class, a photographer in Zhangjiajie, a chartered boat on the Li River, a hot-air balloon, an evening show: all real, all outside the five lines above, all quoted on request.
- It does not model peak-week pricing inside the calculation. The uplift is real, it is roughly 20–50% on vehicle and guide rates and considerably more on hotels, and we have stated it rather than burying it in an average.
- It does not know your dates. Chinese public holidays — Spring Festival, the first week of October, and the summer school break — change hotel availability more than anything else on this page.
- It is not a substitute for a conversation. Six of the last ten quotes we wrote came in under the estimate, because a specialist found a cheaper city order, a better hotel or a train that replaced a flight.
Where these figures come from
- Vehicle day rates and half-day rates: our own published charter rate card, which is the same card we buy against.
- Guide day rates: our 2026 guide rate band, from junior local guide to senior national-level guide with a specialist subject.
- High-speed rail fares: published second-class fares on the corridors we quote most often, including Beijing–Shanghai, Beijing–Xi’an, Shanghai–Hangzhou and Guangzhou–Guilin. First class runs roughly 1.6 times second class.
- Domestic air fares: published economy fares on the same corridors, checked against the routes our clients actually fly.
- Hotel bands: 2026 market rates for properties registered to accept foreign passport holders, by city tier and star rating.
- Attraction tickets: published adult gate prices at the sites we book most often, including the Forbidden City, the Mutianyu Great Wall, the Chengdu panda base and the Shanghai observation decks.
- Exchange rate: the renminbi central parity published by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. The rate used is printed beneath the calculator table every time you run it.
- Tibet permit rules: the region’s tourism authority requirements as applied by licensed agencies at the time of writing.
China trip cost: the questions we are asked most
For a private, guided fourteen-day trip across Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai at four-star hotels, budget about ¥44,357–67,348, or US$6,620–10,052 for the two of you — roughly US$236–359 per person per day. That includes hotels, the private vehicle, the guide, the guide’s own travel, both airport transfers, high-speed rail between the cities, two paid attractions in each city and meals.
Adding two more cities to the same fourteen days — Kunming and Guilin, say — pushes the group total to about ¥45,580–69,660, or US$6,803–10,397. Only US$183–345 more, because the day count is unchanged and the extra intercity legs are short. Adding days is what costs money; adding cities within the same days is comparatively cheap.
Priced honestly, the difference is stark. The same nine-day, three-city trip for two people, with the same hotels and trains but no private vehicle and no guide, comes out at about US$70–129 per person per day. With the vehicle and the guide it is US$242–370. The private layer roughly triples the cost.
What you get for that: no station or airport navigation in a country where almost nothing is in Latin script, a vehicle waiting wherever you are rather than a taxi queue, someone who can change the plan when it rains or when a site is closed for a state visit, and a guide who can explain what you are looking at rather than just where it is. Whether that is worth three times the money is a personal call, and it depends most on how much of your trip is in cities where the metro and the high-speed rail network already work well.
Between ¥600 and ¥1,000 per day for the whole group, not per person. The band reflects the guide’s level: a junior local guide sits at the bottom, a senior guide with a specialist subject — imperial history in Beijing, the Terracotta Army, Buddhist art — sits at the top. Chinese guiding credentials are formally graded from junior through intermediate and senior to national level, and the rate follows the grade.
One thing to watch on a multi-city route: the guide’s own accommodation and meals when travelling with you are a separate cost, roughly ¥400–600 per night. It is a real expense and one that online estimates routinely omit.
No. Attraction tickets, train fares and hotel rates are the same for foreign visitors as for Chinese citizens, and there is no meaningful foreigner surcharge at attractions or on transport.
The real constraint is not price but availability. Chinese hotels are legally required to register every foreign guest with the local police within 24 hours of check-in, and not every property is set up to do it. A cheap room you find on an international booking site can turn out to be closed to you at the desk, while being perfectly available to a domestic traveller. That is why the hotel figures on this page reflect properties we know will take a foreign passport — they are usually a little above the absolute cheapest room in the city.
Second class, per person, per leg, by rail distance. These are the six bands the calculator above applies, listed in full so you can check any leg yourself:
- Under 300 km: ¥60–150. Beijing to Tianjin, Shanghai to Hangzhou, Guangzhou to Shenzhen.
- 300–600 km: ¥150–280. Guangzhou to Guilin, Beijing to Jinan.
- 600–1,000 km: ¥280–450. Shanghai to Wuhan, Beijing to Zhengzhou.
- 1,000–1,500 km: ¥450–650. Beijing to Shanghai, Beijing to Xi’an.
- 1,500–2,000 km: ¥650–850. Shanghai to Chengdu, Beijing to Zhangjiajie.
- Over 2,000 km: ¥850–1,150. Beijing to Kunming, Beijing to Guilin.
First class runs about 1.6 times second class. Tickets go on sale fifteen days before departure and can be booked with a passport on the official 12306 app or through an agent. Your passport is your ticket; you scan it at a manual gate rather than a QR code.
Because the fixed costs do not halve. A solo traveller on the nine-day reference trip at four-star pays about US$415–622 per day, against US$228–351 for one of a couple in the same room class. The vehicle costs the same whether one person or three are in it. The guide costs the same. The guide still needs a room at night. Solo travel simply carries all of it alone.
Two practical consequences. First, if you are travelling alone, joining a small group tour for part of the itinerary can cut the per-day figure by more than half. Second, if you are willing to give up the private vehicle and guide, a solo trip arranged independently is genuinely affordable — the expensive part of solo travel in China is privacy, not the country.
Avoid three windows: Spring Festival, which moves with the lunar calendar and lands in late January or February; the first week of October, when the whole country travels for National Day; and the July–August school break. During these periods vehicle and guide rates rise roughly 20–50% and hotel rates rise considerably more, with availability, not price, becoming the binding constraint.
The best combination of weather and normal pricing is late March to April and September to early November. Winter, from November to March outside Spring Festival, is the cheapest season of the year and works well in the south — Yunnan, Guilin, Guangdong — though it is genuinely cold in Beijing and the north.
No, and deliberately so. Round-trip economy fares from the United States or Europe typically run US$800–2,000 depending on season and how early you book, and from Asia or Australia considerably less. That is often the single largest line on the whole trip, and it swings far more than any ground cost on this page.
We do not sell international air, so we would be guessing. Book it separately, add it to the figure above, and you have your true all-in budget.
Tipping is not expected in China and is not part of any quote we write. Gratuity culture is limited here, and a guide will not be waiting for one. If someone has looked after you exceptionally well over a long trip, a discretionary thank-you is welcome, but it is never assumed and never budgeted for.
This is worth knowing because tipping expectations in some other Asian destinations can add several hundred dollars to a two-week trip. In China, the figure is genuinely zero unless you choose otherwise.
We quote and settle in renminbi, because that is the currency every hotel, transport company and guide is paid in. The dollar figures on this page are a conversion for readability at the rate printed beneath the table, which is the daily renminbi central parity published by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.
Because card payments and international transfers settle at your bank’s rate on the day rather than ours, the dollar amount moves slightly between the day you receive a quote and the day you pay. Every quote we issue is dated for exactly that reason, so you can see which rate it was struck at.
Send us your cities, your dates and how many of you there are. A specialist will come back with a dated, fixed quote — and tell you which parts of the estimate above you can safely cut.