Costing Europe
/Whilst we were living in Europe, my partner and I did a lot of travelling, and this means spending money. As I was earning euros and Mia was earning francs, it was often advantageous for one of us to pay for the other when we were out and about; to keep things fair, we kept a ledger. It was only after we had left Europe, I realised what we had was not just a way to balance the books, it was also valuable data on the cost of travelling in Europe. Consequently, I analysed the data and voilà.
The first plot I made was purely for interest and to show the sort of travellers we were. I am not sure what I expected, but it was something probably more uniform that what was observed. I don't think that it can be discounted that I arrived in autumn and did not travel much as I lost my camera. Similarly, the end of my time in Europe was summer and we travelled pretty heavily in the last few months.
I split our trips into three categories: outdoor, city and hiking. Hiking trips are typically expensive to get to where one is going, but apart from that there is very little cost. City destinations are usually cheap to get to but are expensive as one is paying for food and accommodation. Outdoor trips - basically a trip that is not a city or hiking trip - are all over the place in terms of cost. Access may be so difficult that it is necessary to hire a car or join a tour group. The accommodation is also mixed, as it may be a hotel, a B'n'B or it may be camping. In any case, it would appear that these were our most expensive trips.
This is a plot of the trip length versus the price per day of the trip. You can see that most trips were two nights long and spread over one to three hundred euros a night. There were a few outliers in terms of special events, for example a birthday weekend in Switzerland is never going to be cheap! The most expensive was our trip to Lyon for la fête des lumières as we could not find any reasonable accommodation and ended up in an upmarket hotel. I think the really interesting points are the longer trips. The cheapest long trip was some time we spent in and around Paris, meaning we did not have to pay for accommodation, which clearly is a major contributor. On the other end of the spectrum is a one-week trip we took to Norway in mid-winter where we paid to do a lot of activities. Our week-long trip to Croatia was also quite expensive, mostly due to car hire and lots of ferries - but these are things that almost any tourist would do, so perhaps it is not quite the cheap destination that people may expect. An eight day trip to the ski slopes in France was quite reasonable at about 150 €/day, and likewise, our two week trip to Iceland cost only 200 €/day including car hire.
Producing a plot of price per day versus country shows some counter-intuitive results. Unsurprisingly, our one very expensive trip to Norway means that Norway came out on top. Similarly, our single trips to both Croatia and Italy, neither of which involved much hiking, left the costs high. And here is where it gets interesting: France is more expensive than Switzerland! I put this down to the fact that in Switzerland, we were almost exclusively hiking whereas in France we did do a lot of hiking, but we also did a lot of outdoor activities, like hiring a car to visit Les Gorges du Verdon, or exploring Corsica and Provence. Iceland comes in second last due to us going budget: both in what we did (hiking) and how we survived (camping and eating food we brought with us from France). Germany was unsurprisingly the cheapest.
Just for a point of comparison, I looked at the price per day versus the 2014 GDP per capita values for each country and unsurprisingly there is little correlation with our data. Most noticeable are Croatia, for which I have little explanation, and Switzerland, which can be attributed to the low cost of hiking.
It is not clear how useful this data will be for others; if you spend all your times in cities then I would say there is going to be little correlation with our experiences. However, if you like to get out and explore, then perhaps this will give you a better indication of what you can expect. And remember, Norway is really expensive.