Europe by the Numbers

Both Beth and I have an analytical bent, so we tend to keep track of expenses on our various vacations -- we find it interesting to see how the cost of one trip compares to another and it is helpful in planning future trips. In the past I've used Quicken to keep track of the overall costs of the trip (e.g., the total of all credit card charges & ATM cash withdrawals), but this time I used an iPhone application (http://www.ixpenseit.com/ixpenseit.php) to record individual expenses as they occurred. Kudos to Bob Cowan for having suggested this to me. I wasn't able to capture every single expense, but I probably got 98% of them. This additional data provides some insight into the breakdown of costs within the trip -- fun stuff if you like numbers.

At a high level, we've found that the cost of an expensive vacation runs around $200 per day per person. In our family "expensive" is usually anything you have to get on a plane for -- Europe, Hawaii, Belize, San Diego. "Cheap" vacations involve cars, bicycles, or backpacking. The all-in cost for our four weeks in Europe was $360/day (total cost for both of us) -- less than our historical average. I think this is fairly impressive given the poor exchange rate and the obscene cost of our British Airways tickets.

If we ignore the cost of airfare and just look at what we spent while in Europe then our largest cost was lodging, and that came in at $83/day. That's more than Motel 6 (our el cheapo standard for when we're traveling and just need a place to crash), but still less than a nice hotel. We expected to be over $100/day for lodging, so this was a pleasant surprise.

Transportation is next in line at $32/day. This includes trains, buses, shuttles, ferries, subways, and trams. We knew that this would be a chunk of money since we were completely dependent upon public transportation, but the total cost was still barely more than $800. Nice.

Food came in at a mere $43/day. Breakfast was included in the cost of lodging on most days, and we usually ate one meal/day as a picnic on the go or from the grocery store in our room (e.g., pre-made salads). When we did eat out, some of the meals were in a nice restaurant while others were a kebab shop or beer garden. We don't drink a lot of wine or beer so that keeps the cost down, but I was still very surprised to see a number this low. We clearly didn't order enough desserts.

The last category that I'll mention was admissions -- tours, museums, bike rental, canoe rental, etc -- and it came in at $15/day.

We also spent some money on souvenirs, trinkets, and loot, but I won't get into the numbers. Still, they didn't seem out of line to me.

So the bottom line is that our European adventure wasn't nearly as expensive as I'd expected it to be. If our airline costs were a little more reasonable then we'd have been under $300/day, and that makes four weeks in Europe less expensive than a week in Hawaii (in terms of daily costs).

In terms of where we spent our time, we favored German speaking countries -- 12 days in Germany and 7 days in Austria. The balance (6 days) was in the Czech Republic. We also preferred smaller towns -- 9 days were in what I'd consider big cities (Berlin, Prague, and Munich), 9 in mid-sized cities, and 7 in small towns or villages.