In Western Europe, the main expenses are sleeping accommodation and plane/train travel. After that comes food and drink, sightseeing and souvenirs.
Saving Money on Food
While restaurants with memorable atmospheres and local specialties are a great part of every trip to foreign places, buying unnecessarily expensive food every day is an easy way to waste money.
Buy or bring a jar of peanut butter, steal some bread and jam from the breakfast at your hostel, and have sandwiches for lunch.
Grocery stores are also a good idea for buying cheap food; buying in bulk is almost always cheaper than buying each meal in restaurants or food stands along the way. It is easiest to buy things that don’t need refrigeration or cooking, unless staying in a hostel with a kitchen. Lidl and Aldi are both chains of incredibly cheap grocery stores.
Saving Money on Drinks
For starters, an empty plastic water bottle can be refilled continuously from water fountains to keep from having to buy overpriced bottles at every tourist location. Tap water should be safe to drink all over Western Europe.
For a more serious drink discussion, bars in all tourist locations and big cities are notoriously overpriced. Buying alcohol from grocery stores and pregaming is the way to get around this problem. (In Germany, beer is cheaper than bottled water and in Italy, a decent bottle of wine runs about 2 euros). A bit of forethought is necessary for this plan; while most bars and clubs start and end very late, most grocery stores stop selling alcohol around 10 or 11 p.m.
Pub crawls can be a good deal financially and also a good excuse to strike up conversations with foreigners. As opposed to walking into a random bar and trying to befriend a group of locals, pub crawls are filled with fellow travelers from all over the world, eager to talk to someone other than the few people they've spent the past month with. The drink specials vary from city to city (and are sometimes not worth it) but always involve some amount of free alcohol for an initial price of 10 to 20 Euros. Sandeman’s New Europe Free Tours have an associated pub crawl every night.
A warning: The New Berlin pub crawl is very generous with the free drinks and its last stop is a metro ride away, on the opposite side of the city. It is not a bad idea for pub crawlers to keep a map of the city and the name of their hostel on their person.
Sightsee for Free
Sandeman’s aforementioned New Europe Free Tours are approximately three-hour walking tours of popular cities. The informative and entertaining tour guides work on a tips-only basis, so their fee is completely dependent on the tourist's personal budget. They give tours in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Jerusalem, London, Paris, Prague, Madrid, and Munich. They offer a discount on their associated pub crawls to travelers who have taken the tour that day.
Find out which museums are free or when they have special days. (The Louvre is free every first Sunday of the month; the Vatican Museums are free every last Sunday). There is often a discounted price for travelers with a valid student ID. If hitting multiple museums, some cities have passes that are cheaper than paying for each museum individually.
Street festivals and beer or wine festivals are a good (and free) source of entertainment and offer a glimpse into the local culture. Artists' squares, street markets, and flea markets are also interesting to walk through and can be reasonably priced.
A good way to see the inside of cathedrals is to attend a service there. This affords the added bonus of hearing a church service in another language or in an accented version of English. There is nothing like a fire and brimstone sermon given in a thick Irish brogue.
To save on intra-city transportation, invest in a map and good pair of shoes. Walking is the easiest and cheapest way of getting from place to place, though in a big city like Paris or London, it is best to take the Metro/Underground from time to time to avoid exerting oneself past the point of interest in further sightseeing.
Shopping/Souvenirs
With all this unwasted money, it's time to spend it on souvenirs that will make friends jealous and parents worry. Though most tourism shops only have the standard cheesy fare of a shotglass/keychain/spoon with the name of the city emblazoned on it, it is nice to have something physical to bring back from your trip.
Interesting free souvenirs are coasters, entrance tickets or posters in foreign languages and stolen beer mugs. Instead of (or in addition to) a T-shirt with the name of a country on it, try to bring back something that is unique to the local culture.
Certain clothing stores (such as Penney’s in Dublin) have ridiculously cheap but fashionable clothes and shoes. Buy a pair of shoes for 4 euros at the beginning of the trip and throw them out at the end; but be warned they won’t have very thick soles. It’s worth going to a store like this in a non-English speaking country to see the trend of shirts with random English words on them like “One White Elephant”.
And don’t forget to bring back something nice for Mom.
For travel and accommodation tips, return to
Travel and Accommodation Tips for Budget Travelers
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