20 Days in Europe Budget

We’ve had many people ask us about our budget for Europe and how we were able to afford such a big trip (check out our itinerary here). When I was going through the planning process for us, one of the things I found most helpful was budgets posted by other travelers for how much they had spent. So here is ours below and hopefully someone else will find it useful as well. Click here to see the nice pretty version: Final Budget

I’m pretty proud of it actually and how well we did staying with our spending. We had budgeted $5,000 for the trip which was a little tight but I really wanted to see if we could do it. Only going over budget by $2.49 definitely counts as a success to me! We saved for well over a year for this trip and skipped spending on many other areas in order to make it happen. It took some hard work but we were able to do it. A few pointers on how we got here:

• We ate a lot of meals with food from the grocery store: Bread, cheese, yogurt, fruit, pastries, etc. We did this for pretty much every breakfast then usually bought some street food for lunch.
• Book your chunnel tickets early!! We saved well over $100 by watching the calendar and booking them as soon as they were open (3-4 months ahead of time).
• Of course use rewards when possible. We used our Ultimate Rewards points for some of the activities we did. We also had a really old credit card with some points saved that I didn’t even realize and were able to find some great activities with them! Though I waited too long to book a cooking class in Italy with them so we didn’t end up getting to do that.
• Most trains in Italy require a reservation. You can look these up online, but some of them won’t let you book online if you aren’t an Italian resident. But there are Trenitalia kiosks at the train stations where you can make the reservation yourself. When we arrived at night to the station, we would make our reservation for whichever train we wanted the next day. We never had a problem with it being sold out but that can happen.
• The Salzburg card is an EXCELLENT value, highly recommended.
• Local transportation is more expensive than you realize and it adds up quickly. I was thinking we’d walk or bike a lot, but backpacking already requires a lot of walking and we were tired! On top of that we didn’t have a lot of time in each city so we ended up using the metro to save our legs and time.
• Buy your Eurail passes online and keep an eye out for deals. When I was buying ours they had a special going on where you’d get two extra days for free added to your pass! We didn’t need the extra days but it’s something to keep in mind if your timetables don’t match up exactly.