Fitting a family into the new travel quota. Is $18000 enough?

How many relatives can fit into your overseas shopping budget before there is nothing left for you? For Bangladeshi travellers, that may be a more useful question than how much the hotel costs.

Bangladesh Bank has raised the annual foreign exchange travel entitlement for adult Bangladeshis from $12,000 to $18,000, giving travellers an additional $6,000 to spend abroad. The cash dollar limit, however, remains $5,000 per person.

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The timing could hardly be better for anyone who has ever announced a foreign trip and immediately received a family shopping list. You may have been planning beaches, museums and nice dinners, but your relatives have other priorities. Your aunt wants a perfume, your cousin wants sneakers, your sister has found a skincare set she cannot get here, and someone will definitely ask for chocolates for the entire family.

Suddenly, your carefully planned holiday has become a shopping expedition with one passenger and several very demanding shareholders.

The requests usually begin sweetly.

“Get me anything nice.”

Such a request is dangerous. This means you are now responsible for making the final decision, and if you choose badly, everyone will know.

“Just get me a perfume.”

Sounds harmless until the perfume costs $200. The cousin who asked for “one pair” of sneakers has, somehow, chosen the pair that costs $300.

Then there are the relatives who discover things at the last minute. You are already at the airport when your phone buzzes. Someone has sent you a screenshot with no greeting, no explanation and absolutely no regard for your luggage allowance.

By then, the budget has already been divided into sections. Perfume. Shoes. Chocolate. Cosmetics. Gifts for parents. Gifts for colleagues. A few emergency purchases for people who were not even on the original list. Somewhere between all of these purchases, your own shopping plans disappear.

You know the feeling. You walk into an Apple Store and admire the latest iPhone Pro. Then your brain quietly starts doing family accounting. One aunt's perfume equals three moisturisers. One cousin's sneakers could buy a new pair of shoes for yourself. Perhaps the iPhone can wait.

The new $6,000 buffer means it may not have to.

Now, for once, you could finish the family shopping list and still have enough left for your own little indulgence. It is the iPhone Pro. Maybe it is that absurdly expensive skincare set you have been stalking online for months. Maybe it is a jacket you do not need but absolutely deserve because you have spent the entire trip buying things for other people.

And there is nothing wrong with buying something unnecessary while abroad. In fact, needless purchases are one of the great traditions of travel. A candle that costs far too much. A tiny kitchen gadget whose purpose becomes unclear the moment you return home. Sunglasses that looked incredible under foreign lighting and slightly ridiculous under Dhaka's sun.

Of course, the family will not suddenly stop asking. The extra allowance has not changed that national pastime. You will still get the message asking for one last thing while standing at the checkout counter.

But at least there is now a better chance that when you finally return home and open your suitcase, you will find something in there that nobody asked you to buy.

Something that is, for a change, entirely yours.