Touring Europe for a Year - What does it cost?

Just some of the receipts we
accumulated!

One of the most popular questions about travelling Europe we get asked is how much does it cost. We've decided that in the interest in helping others we'll publish our detailed trip statistics to show you how we did. We did this trip on what we perceived to be a tight budget - perhaps if you are retired then you'll want to do more or if you have more time you will want to do less miles, but with hindsight there is very little we would have changed about our trip. Money management was crucial. Because of our budget constraints we carefully monitored and recorded all of our expenditure to ensure that we weren't over budget.

First, some statistics from our trip!

We travelled 23,044 miles over a period of 334 days from 7^th April 2011 until 6^th March 2012. We passed through 21 countries (stopping in 18) consuming 3,805 litres of Diesel from 62 fuel stations and 280 litres of LPG Gas. We paid 19 road tolls, 14 ferries, 5 vignettes and 4 tunnels.

We 'Wild Camped' for 219 nights (66%), stayed on Aires or other recognised motorhome parking areas for 45 nights (14%) and stayed on camp sites for 70 nights (21% with 29 of those nights being in Morocco).

Food wise we visited 115 supermarkets or other food shops and ate out for usually for lunch but sometimes for tea 101 times.

Our average miles per day were 78 miles and our mode fuel consumption (taking into account number of miles travelled between the calculations and averaging that out) was 33.4MPG.

Adam drove for 170 days (80% of the driving) while Sophie drove for 19 days (10%) and we shared the driving on a further 20 days (10%). There were 123 days (36%) where we didn’t drive anywhere at all.

The maximum number of miles we drove in a day was 372 on the first day of our trip getting from Calais to Dummerlolhausen. The only other day where we exceeded 300 miles was Asiliah to Marrakesh in Morocco (365 miles). The minimum number of miles we did in a day was 2 miles (leaving one place and arriving to stay at another) from Aghios Konstantinon to Gytheio in Greece.

With views like this available for free why pay to stay on a camp site?

Totals

Ok, so enough beating about the bush! What was our grand total?

£9,570.19 or £28.83 per day

Or in other words, two people, a little over 11 months full board for £14.41 per person, per day. This is how we broke down and recorded our spending:

Fuel (42%)We always tried to fill up in the cheaper country.

Food (26%): Food bought from a supermarket / shop. Includes Wine / Beer but not eating out.

LPG (2%): Our gas for cooking, heating and running the fridge when not on sites.
Transport (11%): Tolls, Vignettes, Ferry’s, Bridges, Public Transport & Parking when not overnighting.
EO&E (14%): Eating (and drinking) Out and Entertainment / Entry fees.  Also includes personal items such as clothes, shoes, laundry etc.
Overnight (5%): Cost of sites, aires or parking overnight where a cost applied.

Where the money went, 42% of our expenditure was on Diesel.

What is not included?

Items which we viewed as being outside of our living costs which are: Vehicle Insurance (£500), Vehicle Road Tax (£195), Travel Insurance (£200), Mobile Phone / 3G Internet (£180). We also didn’t include our ‘side trip’ to St Petersburg (£500) as we left the van in Helsinki and felt it would unfairly skew the results. 

Comparing Countries
In the below table we have broken down our expenditure for all of the 18 countries that we stayed in. The biggest factor influencing costs was if we stayed on a camp site or not, which made expensive countries like Norway (where we only spent £2.78 a day on food over 4 weeks, but spent £0 on campsites) appear comparative to Latvia, where we opted to stay on camp sites because of a lack of wild camping opportunities. All of the figures below are laid bare for you to view and dissect and are of course only representative of what we chose to do on this trip and not necessarily of that country as a whole!

Click to enlarge and view a clearer version

So what's our strategy on keeping costs down? 

Our next blog post, Europe on a Budget will be published shortly and a link will appear here!