My bff has spent$4500 on traveling to 15 places, most of them by car. He says Southeast and Midwest tend to pay for hotels, but not Northeast, Northwest and West. His hotels/airbnbs in California made him rank the programs lower because they re-emphasized COL in a specialty that is not very high paying
I wish that I had looked into the cost of applying for residency sooner than I did in medical school. I think I started planning for it at the end of 3rd year. I got a travel rewards card fall of 4th year that gave me a bunch of points for spending a certain amount of money within 3 months and that helped quite a bit. But it would have been nice to get some kind of travel rewards credit card throughout medical school and save the points for travel for residency. I couch surfed a lot to save money, and that helped a lot.