7 European Destinations that Won’t Break the Bank

Since we’re traveling full time, we love it when our money goes a long way. We’re always looking for places where we can get the most value: cities with lots of free or cheap entertainment or great deals for dining out or really affordable Airbnbs. 

After two years of slow traveling our way across Europe, we’ve come up with seven cities that offer great value. These are cities where you can get more bang for your buck in the categories that travelers care about the most like entertainment. dining out and Airbnbs.

If you’ve seen any of our cost of living videos, you’ll know that we’re not budget travelers, although we are budget minded. This means that our top picks aren’t the cheapest destinations. Instead, these are the places where you can get a lot of value for every dollar you spend. 

When we first set off on this big adventure, we really had no idea what everything would cost. Of course, we did a lot of research and we had a budget ready to go. However, we didn’t know how well it would work once we hit the ground. And it didn’t work at first. It turned out that for some categories, specifically for our Airbnbs, our budget was just way too low. We ended up in some pretty uncomfortable apartments, including one that we had to cancel the minute we walked in the door. 

Coming out of our first year of travel, we learned a lot about how we wanted to spend our money. We found that we really valued comfort and a little bit of style in our Airbnbs and we’re willing to pay extra for it. However, we also learned that we don’t need to spend as much in other categories, like entertainment because it’s often cheap or even free. 

Speaking of entertainment, that brings us to our first category; which cities gave us the best value for entertainment?

For me, entertainment is all about immersing myself in history, art and culture. I look for cities that have a lot of all of that on offer. I do have a runner up for this category; I seriously considered making Split in Croatia my top pick. This is a city that was built up in and around a Roman palace and you can spend hours getting lost in all the historic buildings. Split also has a really lovely waterfront promenade and you can soak in the cafe culture for the price of a coffee. I also loved the beach life in Split; the locals are out in the water everyday no matter what temperature is. And you can hop on a bus or a ferry and discover all the other historic towns up and down the coast. 

While you can get pretty far in Split with free or cheap entertainment there’s another city that I was even more excited about: Florence, Italy. Of course, Italy is not known for being an inexpensive place but I found that we got a lot of value for our spend in the city of Florence. 

There’s so much history and culture everywhere you look and we were able to enjoy even more with a free audio tour by Rick Steves. We also had another free Rick Steves tour for the Uffizi, one of Italy’s most famous museums. Going to the Uffizi isn’t cheap at $14 USD a ticket but the payoff is huge. I had a chance to stand in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus painting all on my own and it was magical. Hot tip: if you want the same experience, go there first thing in the morning during low season. 

Of course, from Florence you can grab a city bus and be in the historic town of Fiesole, which offers a beautiful view of the whole region. Or for a few euros you can jump on a train and you’ve got all of Tuscany to explore.

I love history and culture but, for Gillian, entertainment is all about the great outdoors. One place where we got to combine all this together was Northern Greece. We based ourselves in the city of Ioannina and from there we had the whole region to explore.  We went hiking in the mountains of Zagoria which is dotted with charming little villages and stone bridges. We also got to enjoy the beautiful beaches on the coast. But our favourite part was discovering the area of Meteora. This is a surreal landscape of rock formations with incredible monasteries perched on top. For just a couple dollars, you can go inside and see how the monks lived for hundreds of years. 

Of course, one of our favourite reasons for traveling is the food and we especially love places that have a really exciting street food culture. You can just wander the city and snack as you go. And our favourite place for street food in Europe has to be Istanbul, which offers the very best that we’ve seen outside of Asia. 

Let’s start with borek, which Gillian is a little obsessed with. This is a pastry that’s also kind of like a pasta and there are many varieties in terms of the shape or flakiness or type of filling. We also love lamacun, which is a thin bread spread with a meat sauce, baked like a pizza and then rolled up and eaten right away. 

Another one of our favourites are midye dolma: stuffed mussels. You order 10 or 20 of these and eat them on the spot. And when you’re out and about in Istanbul, a grilled intestine sandwich is the perfect on the go snack. For drinks, we really enjoyed trying salep, which is a popular drink during the winter. It’s made of the ground up root of an orchid combined with milk, sugar and cinnamon and it’s absolutely delicious. And this is just a very small sampling of the amazing variety of food on offer in Istanbul. 

Of course, we also really enjoy dining out in restaurants where you get to sit and linger, maybe with a glass of wine. Western Europe can be pricey for dining out but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve found that you can go where the locals go and get really amazing deals. For example, we’re really loving the menu del dia here in Valencia, Spain. This is the menu of the day and for around $18 USD you can get an amazing three course lunch including wine.

Another deal that’s exclusive to Valencia is the traditional brunch combination. This includes an appetiser of olives and peanuts, a sandwich, beer or wine — because it’s Spain after all — and a coffee with rum to finish, all for around $7 USD.

Of course we don’t just dine out while we’re traveling; we also really like to cook at home. And we’ve come across one city which offered incredible value for groceries and that was Belgrade, Serbia. The farmers market there was just bursting with amazing produce and it was so inexpensive. If you’re doing a lot of cooking when you travel, you can easily get by in Belgrade on a pretty low budget. 

That brings us to the most expensive category in any travel budget: where you stay. Since we usually stay for at least a month in each destination, we like to rent an apartment. This is much more affordable than a hotel and helps us feel like we’re living like locals. But finding a great value Airbnb is always a challenge. It’s always going to cost more than local rates to have a fully-furnished, fully-equipped apartment. We’ve come to recognize that paying around double the local rent is pretty standard.

In our two years of travel, we’ve stayed in some pretty great Airbnbs: a lovely historic loft in Malta, just steps from the beach; a stylish penthouse in Athens with a wonderful balcony; a surprisingly affordable charming studio in expensive Dubrovnik. But there was one place that had it all: it was newly renovated, beautifully designed and, best of all, it had a million dollar view.  This was our apartment in the city of Sarande, Albania. Anywhere else this apartment would have been double or even triple the price. But in Albania it only set us back $1,440.

People often have the impression that travel is expensive. Based on our last two years of spending, we’re finding it can be more affordable than you think. It’s traveling slowly that makes the difference. When you stay longer, you get bigger discounts on your apartment rentals and there’s time to find the deals that the locals enjoy.  And of course it’s easy to find good value in lower cost countries. In fact, we’ve made our travel dollars stretch pretty far by going off the beaten path.