You’re thinking that you would like to take a trip to Europe. You’re retired and you no longer have to cram as much as you can into a two-week tour. And, you are thinking a big time trip, involving visits to many countries over an extended period of time is in order. This is the retirement travel you have always dreamed about for yourselves.
So, how much is it going to cost? You know how much your previous whirlwind trips totaled up to, but you really don’t know how to go about budgeting for this, the mother of all European vacations.
In part, to celebrate the Love-goddess’ retirement, we decided to treat ourselves to a leisurely two-month tour around Europe to visit some places we hadn’t yet seen, and to return to some of our favourite haunts. As always, I kept a thorough record of all of our expenditures during the trip. Those details are presented here to provide you with some background information on the chance you may be considering doing something similar.
Although retirement allows for longer trips, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should be thinking about travelling for two months, or even longer. One month is a nice long trip to begin with, and much easier on the pocketbook. Travelling for a month will also give you an idea if you really want to be away from home for longer periods of time. We have found that two months is about our limit.
Our Most Excellent European Vacation – Details and Costs
Time:
8 weeks – September 3, 2015 – October 29, 2015
Travel Method:
Flights – Toronto to Reykjavík to Stockholm; Paris to Reykjavík to Toronto; all via Icelandair
Within Europe – All of our internal travel, from the time we landed in Stockholm until we flew home from Paris, was done by train using a EuRail Pass
Local – Public transit, taxis, tour buses
Itinerary:
Iceland – Reykjavík
Sweden – Stockholm
Denmark – Copenhagen
Germany – Hamburg
Amsterdam – Netherlands
France – Paris, Loire Valley, Bordeaux, Carcassonne
Spain – San Sebastian, Seville, Madrid, Barcelona
Total Cost (two people):
Cost – $27,133.93
Budget – $26,000.00 (based upon a similar trip in 2007)
Right now you’re thinking, “Buddy, your site is suitably named because I’m having a Yikes! moment right now; that’s half the money (or all, or whatever) we have to live on in retirement for the year!” Not to worry, the true cost of the trip itself was several thousand dollars less than that … I’ll explain below …, and we could have easily knocked several thousand dollars off our total cost by travelling slightly differently.
The $27,133.93 total cost included absolutely everything we spent money on while travelling; right down to things like toothpaste and razor blades. Nothing was excluded.
Our Five Travel Expense Categories:
To simplify our record keeping I grouped all of our potential expenditures into just five major categories. These I tracked in a spreadsheet on a per city basis. Doing it by city helped me to understand the relative costs of things between different cities and countries, and how they varied as we travelled from north to south. I still can’t recall why I felt it was important to track “booze” separately. Perhaps I was feeling the need to watch my weight when I first did this back in 2007.
I think the categories are generally self-explanatory, but I have included examples of expenditures that falls into each.
Travel – airfares, EuRail Pass, train reservation fees, airport transport, taxis, transit
Accommodation – hotels, rentals (e.g. Airbnb)
Food – restaurants, take out, grocery store purchases, market purchases
Booze – drinks on patios … Europe is all about sitting on patios and watching the world roll by, with restaurant meals, beer & wine purchased for our hotel room
Other – virtually everything else; museum and art gallery passes, gifts, purchases for ourselves, toiletries, books, post cards, laundry (primarily Laundromats), bus tours, etc., etc., etc. This is certainly a category that could be subdivided further.
Using Category Costs to Budget for Future Trips:
In the table below you can see the total amount spent, and the per day cost, in each category. These show what you might roughly expect to spend yourself on a per day basis. If you want to establish a fast and dirty budget for an extended trip in Europe you could simply take our per total day cost of $476.03, or around up to $500 per day, and multiply that by the number of days you are planning to be away. Needless to say, the accuracy of budgeting using our numbers would vary based upon how “differently” you travel from how we did it.
One detail that I found fascinating when the trip was completed was the final percentage breakdowns for the five categories, and how they compared to a similar trip we took in 2007. As you can see in the table, the percent spent on each category was virtually the same in 2007 and 2015. For us, and possibly you, these are useful indicators when trying to establish budgets for future trips.
True Cost of Our Trip:
I mentioned above that the $27,133.93 cited wasn’t necessarily the true cost of our trip, and that it was actually lower. When you travel for an extended period of time you need to factor in the money you are saving because you are not at home spending. That includes everything from groceries and gasoline to toilet paper and tickets to the opera. The only ongoing “home” costs you will have will be you’re ongoing fixed payments that you cannot stop, such as, car payments, utilities, insurance etc.
To understand the true cost of your trip, calculate how much you will not be spending at home and deduct that from the total cost of your trip spending. In our case this worked out to be $4300 per month. This may be causing you to have another Yikes! moment; you may spend much less. But, if you are regularly tracking your household expenses you should be able to figure out how much you are spending on your monthly variable costs. Deducting two months’ worth of normal costs from the total cost suggested that our true cost for the trip was $18,533.93.
How We Could Have Reduced Our Costs:
I also said that we could have easily reduced some of our travel costs. Here are a couple quick examples. We took a shuttle from our home to the airport in Toronto. This cost us $134 each way, for a total of $268 plus tip. We probably could have had a family member or friend take us in and pick us up.
When we purchased our EuRail rail pass we opted for one that would allow unlimited travel for two months. The cost for this was $3194. Knowing now the number of days we actually traveled by train we could have purchased one for $2396 dollars, or maybe even managed on one for as little as $1830.
The other thing I learned after we arrived home … sadly … was that it is possible to suspend some of your services when travelling. For example, if you subscribe to Bell, and are going to be travelling for a month or more, you can suspend your phone, Internet, and television charges while you are away.
North to South Costs:
My expense tracking confirmed that you can generally expect your travel costs to drop as you move from north to south. Scandinavia was the most expensive area we visited, and Spain was the least expensive area to which we travelled. So, this reality is another factor that might influence your European vacation planning and budgeting.
Questions????:
At this point you are probably thinking, that is all well and good, but you left out a lot of information and I have a number of questions. Like, did you book everything (accommodation, museum and gallery passes, train bookings, etc.) before you left home, where did you get your EuRail pass, how do you handle all of the different languages, how do you find hotels to stay at, … etc., etc. ?
What’s missing is the context. In my next Travel article, which I will post some time in the next two weeks, I will discuss how we travel. In a nutshell, I book the flights and a hotel at the first stop, and then we wing it. That may sound extremely scary to many of you, but it is very doable and even fun. We have found that it is very easy to manage your travel logistics on the fly. Travelling this way provides lots of flexibility, and it helps you to get more fully engaged with the people and culture in the areas you visit.
Future Travel Articles: How we travel, Travel by rail in Europe, Reducing travel costs
