Travel is the one loan purpose people apologise for. Someone will tell me about a medical bill in a level voice and then get slightly sheepish explaining that the family hasn’t taken a proper holiday in four years and their parents are getting older. That doesn’t need an apology. A trip is a real thing to want, and a personal loan is a legitimate way to pay for it. What it does need is different arithmetic from the arithmetic most people do.
Here’s the asymmetry that matters. A renovation you finance over three years keeps working for fifteen. A course you borrow for keeps paying you back for a decade. A trip is fully consumed in the ten days it happens — and then the EMI runs for another twenty-two months. That doesn’t make it a bad reason to borrow. It does mean the loan has to be sized so that paying for last December’s holiday never becomes the reason you can’t do something this December.
Start from the EMI you can carry, not from the itinerary
Most people build a trip the wrong way round: price the itinerary, arrive at a number, then ask what EMI that number implies. Do it in reverse.
Pick the monthly figure you could pay for the next two years without noticing much — not what you could pay in a good month, but in a month with a school fee and a car service in it. For most salaried households I talk to, a discretionary trip sits comfortably between 8% and 12% of take-home. On ₹80,000 net, that’s ₹6,400 to ₹9,600 a month. Multiply by your intended tenure, knock off roughly a tenth for interest, and you have your honest borrowing ceiling before opening a single booking site.
Then — and this is the step people skip — subtract everything you are not borrowing. Trip money almost always has other sources: leave encashment, a bonus landing before the travel date, the ₹40,000 already in the travel fund, the in-laws covering the kids’ tickets. I’ve seen a ₹3,00,000 application become a ₹1,60,000 application in a ten-minute conversation, purely by counting what was already there.
A timing note worth real money: booking six to eight weeks ahead rather than inside a fortnight routinely moves the domestic airfare line by 30-40%, and shoulder-season dates cost materially less than the peak fortnight for identical hotels. If your dates have any give in them, that flexibility is worth more than any rate you could negotiate on the loan.
Considering this kind of loan? Apply for a Securis loan — typical disbursement is 1-2 working days.
The actual math on ₹1,75,000
Say the honest gap — after leave encashment, the existing travel fund and everything else — comes to ₹1,75,000, at 15% APR on a reducing-balance basis. Here’s what you’re signing up for:
- 12 months — EMI ₹15,795, total interest ₹14,542
- 18 months — EMI ₹10,917, total interest ₹21,512
- 24 months — EMI ₹8,485, total interest ₹28,644
Stretching from 12 to 24 months roughly halves the monthly outgo — ₹7,310 back in your pocket each month — and costs ₹14,102 extra in interest. That’s the trade, and neither end of it is wrong.
Here’s where I’d be more opinionated than on a renovation: for a trip, lean short. Tenure should roughly match how long the thing you bought keeps delivering, and a holiday’s shelf life is measured in weeks. Twelve or eighteen months means the loan closes while the photos are still recent. Thirty-six months on a ₹1,75,000 trip works out to ₹6,066 a month and ₹43,392 in interest — the EMI looks lovely, and you’ll be paying it off in the third autumn afterwards, most likely while planning the next one. If ₹8,485 over 24 months doesn’t fit, the useful answer is usually a smaller trip, not a longer loan.
And don’t let the low EMI at a long tenure talk you into a bigger number. If 24 months is what makes ₹1,75,000 affordable, the answer is ₹1,75,000 over 24 months — not ₹2,50,000 over 36 because ₹8,666 still looks manageable on paper.
What actually decides your approved amount
Worth being direct about the mechanics, because this is where applications get surprising. We don’t underwrite the trip. Nobody at Securis is evaluating your itinerary or asking for hotel confirmations. What sets your limit is your own income and banking behaviour — principally your FOIR, the share of monthly income already committed to debt repayment.
A worked example. Net salary of ₹55,000 credited to the bank each month. At a 50% FOIR ceiling, total EMIs across everything can run to about ₹27,500. If you’re already paying ₹11,500 on a vehicle loan and about ₹2,500 in card minimums, your headroom is roughly ₹13,500. The 18-month option at ₹10,917 fits inside that. The 12-month option at ₹15,795 does not — that application comes back either restructured to a longer tenure or approved for a smaller amount, and neither is a rejection, just arithmetic.
So: salary credited to a bank account rather than taken in cash, a clean bounce history, and existing obligations that leave genuine headroom. Those three things decide your number. “Travel” is disclosed as the purpose on your documents, properly, but it isn’t what the credit decision turns on — every personal purpose is assessed the same way.
The checklist, and when to skip the loan
Before you apply, five things:
- Fix the EMI first, from an average month’s cash flow, not the itinerary.
- Subtract every non-loan source — bonus, leave encashment, existing travel fund, family contributions — before landing on the amount.
- Choose the shortest tenure your cash flow honestly tolerates, and treat a longer one as a cost you’ve consciously accepted.
- Check your own FOIR headroom so the approved figure isn’t a surprise.
- Keep a buffer outside the loan for the genuinely unforeseeable — a missed connection, a medical detour, a visa fee revision.
Skip the loan entirely in three situations. If the trip is more than eight or nine months out, a disciplined savings plan beats any loan on cost, and you still have time to run one. If you’re already near your FOIR ceiling, adding a discretionary EMI on top isn’t something I’d want us to approve or you to carry. And if your emergency buffer is thin, fix that first — a holiday financed on top of no cushion is how a small unrelated shock turns into a real problem.
If you’re travelling with kids old enough to hold their own spending money, how much to hand over and in what form is its own decision — our sister brand has a useful piece on money rules for a child’s first trip away that transfers reasonably well to a family holiday.
The summary I’d give a friend: work backwards from the EMI, count what you already have before you borrow, keep the tenure short because the trip is short, and go. A well-sized travel loan is one clean line in the monthly budget that disappears in a year or two. A badly sized one quietly rations the next few years of everything else — and that’s the only version of this I’d talk you out of.
If you want a second opinion on your specific situation, WhatsApp us — we’ll be honest about whether Securis fits.