Before we decided to take this journey abroad we found some blogs of others who had travelled extensively and tracked down every cent they spent on the journey, and that was extremely helpful in understanding some of the true costs of traveling abroad. Of course, the only people doing such accounting are usually young backpackers traveling on a shoestring budget, not families of three whose teenage daughter would not abide a single cockroach (not that I welcome them either). When Mike and I travelled the world for 400 days, 17 years ago, we were those backpackers forgoing the $2 night hotel room with a private bathroom for the $1 night hotel room that had a shared bathroom…despite the fact you might be sick with traveller diarrhea. Now that we are middle-aged, we apparently have standards, and bringing a school-aged kid into the mix changes the dynamic significantly. Hostels no longer make sense as beds for 3 people cost the same as hotels, she also needs a place to do her online school work, and as any parent of teenage daughters can attest to…the girl wants her own room. I also want a place to write, that is not in bed, and we all want the permission to snore without driving eachother crazy. Bascially travelling bliss = Space, which in this case is normally provided by apartment hotels, some of them are admittedly nicer than others.
The child’s schooling is also dictating the pace of the trip, we stay in places longer than we might have normally so she can catch up on school work/attend online class which affects the prices of where we stay. The general rule of thumb is that if we are touring somewhere, the minimum stay is 3-4 nights and that requires some sort of apartment, which costs more generally. If we are just transiting somewhere, a hotel room with 3 beds (the cheaper option) for a night will work, but it has to have breakfast included. A standard hotel room for 3 nights would be anarchy. We are also being sucked into the teenage sleep vortex as teens just require more sleep than we do and with her online schooling being late in the evening (we are currently 10hrs ahead in time zones than her home class) keeps her wound up and staying up late. So we might be headed out the door to tour things around eleven or noon, which keeps our teen happier than the sleep beast she becomes when I try to rouse her at 8am. Now you know the parameters that we are working within, let’s get to the finances.
My husband loves a good spreadsheet so we added each expense and separated them into categories such as food (meals out and groceries), miscellaneous (toiletries, souvenirs etc), transport (flights, taxi’s, metro passes, rail, car rentals), accommodation (hotels, airbnb’s), and entertainment (tours, entrance fees, etc.). A little surprisingly, the cost of feeding 3 people in Europe is what cost the most $$$ with over 32% of the budget dedicated to that. We noticed this trend and the only way we could combat these costs was to cook at home more (which was sometimes difficult lacking basic spices, cooking oils, and basic kitchen equipment at these bare bones AirB&B’s), if we stayed at hotels we made sure they had breakfast buffets included, and we basically only ate 2 meals a day…and only ordered 2 out of 3 entrees and shared everything. Breakfast was always quite late (thanks to the sleeping cranky teen), lunch was skipped, and dinner was eaten out. We were unintentionally intermittedly fasting due to circumstance rather than for trendy diet reasons.
The second largest category was accommodation, which by rights should have been the largest category, however we spent 23 of 67 days (34%) house/pet sitting or staying with friends across europe which helped the budget incredibly. The places we pet sat through Trusted House Sitters were also some of the most expensive places in europe, London & Switzerland…so that was a major help and totally worth the $200CAD membership fee I spent to signup for the site before we left.
The transport costs of the trip were a surprisingly low percentage (especially considering that there is an gas crisis on) and the only way we kept this number low was due to getting a really cheap car rental in France ($17 CAD a day) and avoiding high cost rail journeys. Again this is where travelling with 3 made more sense to take a car rental. Yes, gas was high, but with the price of the car rental things worked out reasonably well. We also managed to get to get a flight sale over to Europe.
The last category I wanted to chat about was the yellow entertainment section, the whole reason we were on this trip. Exploring and seeing new things was only costing us about 22% of the budget, what an awful rate of return. I was hoping to see that yellow entertainment section to be a much larger slice of the pie, and maybe it will be when we are out of places where the cost of living is so high.
So to sum up, we have travelled to Italy, UK, Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Greece over 67 days. The total daily cost for Europe, traveling in the style we did, was $408/day (CAD). This number will come down significantly (thank heavens) when we cross into central asia, se asia, and probably spike up again in far east asia. If this sort of stuff is interesting to you, drop a comment and thanks for reading!
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