In 2009, how much does it cost to backpack in Europe?
December 25, 2009 10:27 PM Subscribe
Mainly to settle an argument: what is your best estimate on what it would cost for 2 North American adults in their 30s to spend about 6 - 8 weeks traveling through Eastern Europe? They say $10,000. I say - that's ridiculous.
After a conversation about travel with friends of ours this evening, I'm wondering if I'm way out of touch with how much backpacking costs these days. 10 years ago, I did 8 weeks in Western and Eastern Europe for about $3,500 - flight included. 6 years ago, I spent 6 months in Russia studying and teaching and spent about
$7,500.
So - what does it cost now - especially when it comes to accommodations? Are we too old to stay in hostels now? Is it still possible to rent / sublet apartments - in Poland and Russia, for example - for a couple hundred dollars for a few week's stay? Please bring me a little bit up to date and tell me (if you can) that it most certainly would not cost $10,000 for a backpacking trip where one maintains a reasonably comfortable standard of traveling.
A note - these funds are in CDN $.
After a conversation about travel with friends of ours this evening, I'm wondering if I'm way out of touch with how much backpacking costs these days. 10 years ago, I did 8 weeks in Western and Eastern Europe for about $3,500 - flight included. 6 years ago, I spent 6 months in Russia studying and teaching and spent about
$7,500.
So - what does it cost now - especially when it comes to accommodations? Are we too old to stay in hostels now? Is it still possible to rent / sublet apartments - in Poland and Russia, for example - for a couple hundred dollars for a few week's stay? Please bring me a little bit up to date and tell me (if you can) that it most certainly would not cost $10,000 for a backpacking trip where one maintains a reasonably comfortable standard of traveling.
A note - these funds are in CDN $.
If you spent time lining up couchsurfing arrangements, accommodations would be almost free (but for the price of a thank-you gift, probably.) If you're comfortable with that sort of thing, you could really cut costs - though the site is for travelers who are interested in their host and not just looking for a cheap place to crash.
You're not too old to stay in hostels, by the way, though a few might turn you away.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:41 PM on December 25, 2009
You're not too old to stay in hostels, by the way, though a few might turn you away.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:41 PM on December 25, 2009
Response by poster: Maybe I should clarify. I wouldn't be comfortable with couchsurfing. I'm talking about hostels if possible (I thought some had age limitations) or other types of cheaper accommodation (not camping, either). A modest restaurant meal once a day or every second day and supermarket purchases the rest of the time. A train trip every 4 - 5 days. And museum / cultural-event type admissions.
posted by kitcat at 10:51 PM on December 25, 2009
posted by kitcat at 10:51 PM on December 25, 2009
I spent 3 weeks in Bulgaria last April - all around the country. With flight it cost me a little over $2000. Stayed in hostels, traveled by bus, train, and taxi. Food off the street is cheap, safe, and delicious. Ditto, actually, for restaurants. I'm not sure how it compares with the rest of Eastern Europe, but I imagine that another 3-5 weeks would have only run me another $2000.
posted by Detuned Radio at 11:22 PM on December 25, 2009
posted by Detuned Radio at 11:22 PM on December 25, 2009
Best answer: I just did this, sleeping in Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia again, Bosnia, Austria, and Czech. None of the hostels had age limitations, and I ran into quite a fellow guests in their 60s. I paid around $10-12 a night for hostels except in Turkey, Austria, and Czech where I paid more like $15-20. You can look around on hostelworld.com to check prices for specific countries and cities. The prices I paid were for rooms shared with an average of 6 people. Lots of hostels offer doubles or triples, sometimes with private bathrooms, which is an option you might find more comfortable. The premium for a private room varied wildly from Kosovo ($3) to Prague (much, much more).
I would suggest that the first step in maintaining a more comfortable standard of traveling would be to pre-book all of your hostels on the aforementioned Hostelworld.com. You may lose a night here or there due to missed trains, but you'll save loads of time, stress, and money in internet cafes trying to find a place to sleep for the night.
Take out a calculator and add up the price of hostels and transportation (you can easily find approximate ticket prices for any train/bus route by googling). It would help to know what countries you're considering as the food prices will differ. Cooking all the time can be quite bothersome and doesn't introduce you to the culture, but many places have great street food or other fairly cheap options.
I'd have to look at bank statements to be sure, but I think I spent about $5000 on my 3 months in Europe, which included the aforementioned countries plus a month hiking in Spain and week in Italy. I enjoyed daily beers and coffees, and ventured all the way to western Turkey and back, but I WWOOFed for 20 days and was frugal enough to spend three nights sleeping on a beach in Albania without a tent. Cities like Rome, Istanbul, and Prague were insanely, painfully expensive.
posted by acidic at 12:05 AM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]
I would suggest that the first step in maintaining a more comfortable standard of traveling would be to pre-book all of your hostels on the aforementioned Hostelworld.com. You may lose a night here or there due to missed trains, but you'll save loads of time, stress, and money in internet cafes trying to find a place to sleep for the night.
Take out a calculator and add up the price of hostels and transportation (you can easily find approximate ticket prices for any train/bus route by googling). It would help to know what countries you're considering as the food prices will differ. Cooking all the time can be quite bothersome and doesn't introduce you to the culture, but many places have great street food or other fairly cheap options.
I'd have to look at bank statements to be sure, but I think I spent about $5000 on my 3 months in Europe, which included the aforementioned countries plus a month hiking in Spain and week in Italy. I enjoyed daily beers and coffees, and ventured all the way to western Turkey and back, but I WWOOFed for 20 days and was frugal enough to spend three nights sleeping on a beach in Albania without a tent. Cities like Rome, Istanbul, and Prague were insanely, painfully expensive.
posted by acidic at 12:05 AM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]
Best answer: You can figure this out, you don't have to guess or take our word for it. The general budget guideline is still €50 per day at the low-spend end of the spectrum. You can stay in a hostel for €15 a night*, eat for €15 a day out of a grocery store, and still have money left over for admission and transport - that's bus and train tickets in cities and between destinations.
I would not, however, include my trans-Atlantic fare in that budget. All in, I'd say about 4K EUR or €6K CAD for two people. I'd want the extra room in my budget to avoid the particular inconveniences of cheap student travel, like sleeping on trains in non-sleeper cars and not being able to have a nice restaurant meal if I really wanted one.
People like all different kinds of travel guides but for what you're looking at, I still say Let's Go Eastern Europe is the best guide book for regional budget travel. It's aimed at students but you can choose the "one step up from that" options for accommodation for each city or town, and the restaurant and city guides are great.
*Yes you can do it for less but at 37, what is "comfortable" and acceptable is different than what it was at 20.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:31 AM on December 26, 2009
I would not, however, include my trans-Atlantic fare in that budget. All in, I'd say about 4K EUR or €6K CAD for two people. I'd want the extra room in my budget to avoid the particular inconveniences of cheap student travel, like sleeping on trains in non-sleeper cars and not being able to have a nice restaurant meal if I really wanted one.
People like all different kinds of travel guides but for what you're looking at, I still say Let's Go Eastern Europe is the best guide book for regional budget travel. It's aimed at students but you can choose the "one step up from that" options for accommodation for each city or town, and the restaurant and city guides are great.
*Yes you can do it for less but at 37, what is "comfortable" and acceptable is different than what it was at 20.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:31 AM on December 26, 2009
oops, upon looking at DarlingBri's answer, I forgot that the prices for the hostels were in euros, not in USD, which is one of the big reasons why my trip cost so much!
posted by acidic at 4:05 AM on December 26, 2009
posted by acidic at 4:05 AM on December 26, 2009
My mother and I spent about $2000 this past September, not including her airfare (I live in Poland already), staying in apartments in Warsaw and Krakow, seeing everything we wanted to see, and eating out basically all the time aside from morning coffee in the flat over two weeks, so the $10,000 for 10 weeks scales right. Eastern Europe is not Southeast Asia.
Salaries definitely have not risen to match the rise in costs that we've seen here in the ast few years, so be prepared to pay just as much for, say, socks as you would at home. Local transport, restaurant meals, and trains are, usually, a lot cheaper than Western Europe or America, but not always. A bus/metro/tram ticket in Warsaw, for example, is just about $1 (2.80 zł), which adds up if you're there for a week (though multi-ride passes are cheaper).
Had we cooked more (be careful that your flat includes enough cookware to actually cook!) we could have saved money, but would have seen less as we'd have been in the flat for a few more hours a day. Nice-ish but cheap apartments were about $40-$70 a night, but the price dropped, sometimes by 20 percent or more, if you stayed for more than, say, 4 days.
Self-catering can be cheap here when you travel, but most flats weren't equipped with staples, and we weren't keen on lugging bottles of olive oil or salt or whatever onto various modes of transport en route to our next destination. We worked out that for the two days where we tried, we spent over an hour in two grocery stores and saved about 10 zł, which is close to $3. To us, this wasn't worth it. A full meal for two, with drinks, on the intercity train from Warsaw to Krakow came to just $20 - and that was way overpriced. There were times we spent $100/300 zł on amazing dinners with wine and dessert, and times we just went to the bakery for breakfast and spent closer to $5/15 zł on coffee and pastries.
We also dispelled with backpacks; there was simply no need for them (though we did travel "carry-on only", with wheels and handles, for cobblestoney bits) as both places we stayed had washing machines (though no one has dryers here! Don't do laundry the night before you leave unless it's perched next to the heater!)
The apartment was really only a better deal in Krakow, as it was in the neighborhood we wanted to be in (Kazimierz) and the price undercut hotel prices by a lot, so in the end we booked at the Castle Inn in Warsaw - in the center of the Old Town! - and the convenience of being right in the middle of things way, way overcame the fact that we didn't have a kitchen.
We relied heavily on TripAdvisor's "speciality lodging" category when looking to book. Here's Krakow's.
Go further west and things are pricier; go further east (Ukraine)/southeast (to the Balkans) and things are cheaper. Big cities like Prague or Kiev and Budapest will charge whatever they want; you'll get better deals in regional centers like Vilnius or Wroclaw or Lviv.
Finally, if you hewed closer to the six-week limit, you'd feel more comfortable for the duration of your trip. It was nice to know that we didn't need to skip overpriced tours for things we really wanted to see (Wawel Castle is over 100 zł to see it all, and you should!) or (horror) skip dessert. We took advantage of all the online booking discounts and coupons we could, but also ate a lot of cake.
At the end of the day, if you're the kind of people who know you'll be spending an hour looking for a "decently priced" restaurant and bickering about saving $5/15 zł, then revisit the idea of such a tight budget, limit your time (could you spend five weeks instead and be really cozy?) and destinations (stick to one or two countries, or one region - Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary; the Baltics; the Balkans; Greece and Turkey; Ukraine), and enjoy what time you have.
You won't remember or miss the $10 you saved on your self-catered sandwich, but you will definitely remember the rafting trip you took down the Dunajec Gorge, or the classical concert you saw, or the old lady who gave you directions when you got lost that time you rented bikes.
posted by mdonley at 4:06 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]
Salaries definitely have not risen to match the rise in costs that we've seen here in the ast few years, so be prepared to pay just as much for, say, socks as you would at home. Local transport, restaurant meals, and trains are, usually, a lot cheaper than Western Europe or America, but not always. A bus/metro/tram ticket in Warsaw, for example, is just about $1 (2.80 zł), which adds up if you're there for a week (though multi-ride passes are cheaper).
Had we cooked more (be careful that your flat includes enough cookware to actually cook!) we could have saved money, but would have seen less as we'd have been in the flat for a few more hours a day. Nice-ish but cheap apartments were about $40-$70 a night, but the price dropped, sometimes by 20 percent or more, if you stayed for more than, say, 4 days.
Self-catering can be cheap here when you travel, but most flats weren't equipped with staples, and we weren't keen on lugging bottles of olive oil or salt or whatever onto various modes of transport en route to our next destination. We worked out that for the two days where we tried, we spent over an hour in two grocery stores and saved about 10 zł, which is close to $3. To us, this wasn't worth it. A full meal for two, with drinks, on the intercity train from Warsaw to Krakow came to just $20 - and that was way overpriced. There were times we spent $100/300 zł on amazing dinners with wine and dessert, and times we just went to the bakery for breakfast and spent closer to $5/15 zł on coffee and pastries.
We also dispelled with backpacks; there was simply no need for them (though we did travel "carry-on only", with wheels and handles, for cobblestoney bits) as both places we stayed had washing machines (though no one has dryers here! Don't do laundry the night before you leave unless it's perched next to the heater!)
The apartment was really only a better deal in Krakow, as it was in the neighborhood we wanted to be in (Kazimierz) and the price undercut hotel prices by a lot, so in the end we booked at the Castle Inn in Warsaw - in the center of the Old Town! - and the convenience of being right in the middle of things way, way overcame the fact that we didn't have a kitchen.
We relied heavily on TripAdvisor's "speciality lodging" category when looking to book. Here's Krakow's.
Go further west and things are pricier; go further east (Ukraine)/southeast (to the Balkans) and things are cheaper. Big cities like Prague or Kiev and Budapest will charge whatever they want; you'll get better deals in regional centers like Vilnius or Wroclaw or Lviv.
Finally, if you hewed closer to the six-week limit, you'd feel more comfortable for the duration of your trip. It was nice to know that we didn't need to skip overpriced tours for things we really wanted to see (Wawel Castle is over 100 zł to see it all, and you should!) or (horror) skip dessert. We took advantage of all the online booking discounts and coupons we could, but also ate a lot of cake.
At the end of the day, if you're the kind of people who know you'll be spending an hour looking for a "decently priced" restaurant and bickering about saving $5/15 zł, then revisit the idea of such a tight budget, limit your time (could you spend five weeks instead and be really cozy?) and destinations (stick to one or two countries, or one region - Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary; the Baltics; the Balkans; Greece and Turkey; Ukraine), and enjoy what time you have.
You won't remember or miss the $10 you saved on your self-catered sandwich, but you will definitely remember the rafting trip you took down the Dunajec Gorge, or the classical concert you saw, or the old lady who gave you directions when you got lost that time you rented bikes.
posted by mdonley at 4:06 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]
It depends entirely upon your accommodations and eating habits.
A few comments about traveling through Europe :
Avoid scummy hostels sites that conceal contact information until after booking, ala like hostelworld.com. You can usually obtain contact information immediately from hostelz.com without even booking through them, meaning you can build yourself a backup list for alternatives in case your plans change, call to check if they have wifi, etc.
If your industrious, you can learn about the local cuisine online and save money buy eating local food from a grocery store rather than a touristic restaurant. You can obviously try the local cheeses this way without learning anything, but a grocery store will sell you something like Cassoulet if you know that's what your after.
Eurail passes are a good deal in "law abiding" countries like Germany, but not usually in Southern or Eastern European countries. Eurail will almost never save you money in Italy. Eurail reservation alone are sometimes even more expensive than the tickets in Spain, never mind the pass itself. Eurail can theoretically save lots in France, as TGVs are very fast, but French Eurail reservations run out quickly, meaning you'll rarely realize these savings.
Do use skyscanner.net to find cheap flights within Europe. But remember the the cheapest airlines like ryanair and easyjet make their money by tagging you for an extra two hundred euros whenever you miss your flight or violate their baggage rules.
Always buy reservations for cabins that lock on sleeper trains, you can share the cabin with strangers, but people who sleep in seats not inside locked cabins are routinely robbed in Italy and Eastern Europe.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:42 AM on December 26, 2009
A few comments about traveling through Europe :
Avoid scummy hostels sites that conceal contact information until after booking, ala like hostelworld.com. You can usually obtain contact information immediately from hostelz.com without even booking through them, meaning you can build yourself a backup list for alternatives in case your plans change, call to check if they have wifi, etc.
If your industrious, you can learn about the local cuisine online and save money buy eating local food from a grocery store rather than a touristic restaurant. You can obviously try the local cheeses this way without learning anything, but a grocery store will sell you something like Cassoulet if you know that's what your after.
Eurail passes are a good deal in "law abiding" countries like Germany, but not usually in Southern or Eastern European countries. Eurail will almost never save you money in Italy. Eurail reservation alone are sometimes even more expensive than the tickets in Spain, never mind the pass itself. Eurail can theoretically save lots in France, as TGVs are very fast, but French Eurail reservations run out quickly, meaning you'll rarely realize these savings.
Do use skyscanner.net to find cheap flights within Europe. But remember the the cheapest airlines like ryanair and easyjet make their money by tagging you for an extra two hundred euros whenever you miss your flight or violate their baggage rules.
Always buy reservations for cabins that lock on sleeper trains, you can share the cabin with strangers, but people who sleep in seats not inside locked cabins are routinely robbed in Italy and Eastern Europe.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:42 AM on December 26, 2009
Best answer: This metafilter question of mine addresses the issue of whether you are too old to stay in a hostel. (Executive summary: if you find the right establishment and approach your stay with the appropriate attitude, you're never too old to stay in a hostel.)
posted by jason's_planet at 10:50 AM on December 26, 2009
posted by jason's_planet at 10:50 AM on December 26, 2009
There are a few relevant things you don't mention. Do you speak any of the languages in the area? That makes a big difference price-wise when renting rooms and that sort of thing. What countries are you visiting? Are you willing to share rooms in hostels? (Hell, I won't even stay in hostels!) Does this include airfare?
Prices have gone *way* up in the past decade. But not evenly at all. You can still stay for very little in rural areas of some countries, but not necessarily in others. Prices in the cities have gone up a lot pretty much everywhere. Typically, the more "Western" a country's become, the more it costs. But in some of the least Western countries - those without decent tourist infrastructure - the costs have become really expensive, as anyone from the West is seen, more or less, as a mark.
In any case, "ten years ago" is a lifetime ago in Eastern Europe. Don't go by what it was like then, far too much has changed in unpredictable ways for knowledge of what things cost then to be worth anything.
Your eight-week $9,500 figure (I've changed all this to American dollars) equals about $85 per person per day, if you don't include airfare. Or about $67 per day if you subtract two plane tickets at $1000 each. You could live fairly well on that if you kept to the very cheap regions. This would be a sad way to travel if you kept to the more expensive places (Hungary, Czech Republic, capital cities.) A lot depends, too, on how much you travel and what you do during the day and what you consider a "comfortable standard."
Personally, I don't think you'd be comfortable staying in a lot of the hostels where it's under $20 per person per night. I also think it's really odd when people backpack to Europe and miss the ethnic cuisine and friendship with locals and a lot of other experiences because they're slumming it. I wrote in another thread about how I hated staying in hostels because you tended to meet a lot of nice people who are so hell-bent on extending their stay via personal deprivation that they can't afford to do anything but "splurge" on $2 museum entrances and eating the local equivalent of street hot dogs. So a lot of your budget concerns relate to how *you* feel about these things.
That said, a daily budget of $67 - $85 per person per day is about right, when you add in the occasional more expensive night's stay and some travel. (For instance, I want to say - I can't remember exactly - that a ticket between Budapest and Cluj-Napoca is about $40, and that's perhaps a journey of average length.) You could do it for a little less and live less comfortably, or stay longer and have a better budget. But keep in mind, this is low-end travel, and you will, at times not be really comfortable. I'd recommend you take your $9500 and spend only six weeks there *and* limit the amount of travel you do to about three countries at most (if they're smaller than, say, Romania.) Yeah, it's two weeks fewer, but I'd rather have six great weeks than eight weeks, of which there are a total of two weeks worth of crap and discomfort.
This figure, by the way, is pretty much exactly what DarlingBri calculates for low-budget travel. It squares with what mdonley says, and pretty much what acidic says when you convert the figures there to Euros and add in the fact that his/her travel was largely in cheap places and he/she did some extremely frugal stuff.
So $10,000 is certainly not ridiculous; I'd consider it low-end at best.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 12:34 PM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]
Prices have gone *way* up in the past decade. But not evenly at all. You can still stay for very little in rural areas of some countries, but not necessarily in others. Prices in the cities have gone up a lot pretty much everywhere. Typically, the more "Western" a country's become, the more it costs. But in some of the least Western countries - those without decent tourist infrastructure - the costs have become really expensive, as anyone from the West is seen, more or less, as a mark.
In any case, "ten years ago" is a lifetime ago in Eastern Europe. Don't go by what it was like then, far too much has changed in unpredictable ways for knowledge of what things cost then to be worth anything.
Your eight-week $9,500 figure (I've changed all this to American dollars) equals about $85 per person per day, if you don't include airfare. Or about $67 per day if you subtract two plane tickets at $1000 each. You could live fairly well on that if you kept to the very cheap regions. This would be a sad way to travel if you kept to the more expensive places (Hungary, Czech Republic, capital cities.) A lot depends, too, on how much you travel and what you do during the day and what you consider a "comfortable standard."
Personally, I don't think you'd be comfortable staying in a lot of the hostels where it's under $20 per person per night. I also think it's really odd when people backpack to Europe and miss the ethnic cuisine and friendship with locals and a lot of other experiences because they're slumming it. I wrote in another thread about how I hated staying in hostels because you tended to meet a lot of nice people who are so hell-bent on extending their stay via personal deprivation that they can't afford to do anything but "splurge" on $2 museum entrances and eating the local equivalent of street hot dogs. So a lot of your budget concerns relate to how *you* feel about these things.
That said, a daily budget of $67 - $85 per person per day is about right, when you add in the occasional more expensive night's stay and some travel. (For instance, I want to say - I can't remember exactly - that a ticket between Budapest and Cluj-Napoca is about $40, and that's perhaps a journey of average length.) You could do it for a little less and live less comfortably, or stay longer and have a better budget. But keep in mind, this is low-end travel, and you will, at times not be really comfortable. I'd recommend you take your $9500 and spend only six weeks there *and* limit the amount of travel you do to about three countries at most (if they're smaller than, say, Romania.) Yeah, it's two weeks fewer, but I'd rather have six great weeks than eight weeks, of which there are a total of two weeks worth of crap and discomfort.
This figure, by the way, is pretty much exactly what DarlingBri calculates for low-budget travel. It squares with what mdonley says, and pretty much what acidic says when you convert the figures there to Euros and add in the fact that his/her travel was largely in cheap places and he/she did some extremely frugal stuff.
So $10,000 is certainly not ridiculous; I'd consider it low-end at best.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 12:34 PM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]
It's not Eastern Europe, but as a datapoint I spent $5500 for 4 weeks of low-budget hostel travel in Western Europe last year. That includes airfare and about $500 in gear.
posted by sah at 6:15 PM on December 26, 2009
posted by sah at 6:15 PM on December 26, 2009
A reasonable standard for budget travelling in Europe is about $2000-$3000/month plus flights (regularly as low as $500 depending on where you're going or coming from) though, of course, you can go much lower and much much higher. This should cover staying in decent hostels, restaurants every evening and a few beers. Obviously, you can spend more for treats and the higher end of the scale will cover more luxuries and it will be possible to get closer to the low end the further East you go. Even with a train pass, travel will necessarily be one of your biggest expenses. I would completely disagree with Dee Xtrovert as I would claim that often, the best way to see the real country, meet locals and taste good food is to travel on a reasonable budget. Of course, it is silly to limit your trip by excessive frugality and begrudging museum fees and the like will mean you miss a lot. However, there needn't be anything uncomfortable about staying in a $15/night hostel and you can get some truly excellent food for $20 in the right places.
posted by turkeyphant at 3:17 AM on December 27, 2009
posted by turkeyphant at 3:17 AM on December 27, 2009
« Older What's the name of this mysterious squirrel song? | Minimum number of individuals for a starter colony Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by sanka at 10:30 PM on December 25, 2009