Just The Bill, Please...

Before we get down to serious business, let me comment on the curious European restaurant tradition of making the customer practically beg for the bill. Oh, if you ask for it directly, it will arrive soon enough. But you have to ask. And that requires that you first find your server and catch their attention at a rare moment when they are not busy. If you don't ask for it, it may never arrive. The situation seems to stem from the way they approach dining out - as an event more than a meal meant to fill an empty stomach. So the event could last hours. That's fine for the locals who have no sightseeing goals. But when a family of five needs to follow some kind of timeline in order to see some sights, a three-hour meal is not an option. So we have to ask for the bill. We need to move on, and so do the faithful blog readers. Here is the bill;

(for comparison, see the blog "Expenses, part 2" in May)

Central Europe, 2010, 35 days, $1=.79 Euro, 224 HUF, 20 CK, 3.2 PZL

Airfare: 4,250

Ground Transport: 2,250

Lodging (34 nights): 4,070

Food: 1,940

Entertainment/Incidentals: 1,640

Subtotal: 14,150

House Sitter: +350

Away Savings: -1,200

Final Total: $13,300 ($380/day)

Airfare: We actually bought our tickets way back in late October. We saw that IcelandAir had fares for the open-jaw Amsterdam/Munich cities for a net $850 per person. The other airlines were over $100 more pp so it seemed more likely that IcelandAir would raise their fares soon to come closer to matching the norm, than any chance of fares getting lower. Besides, $850 was a good price. You don't want to play the waiting game with any fares under $1,000 during the high season. If you see one, take it. It proved wise since airfares only rose from that point onward. By March those same tickets were $300 more pp.

Ground Transport: We used a roughly 50/50 combination of car rentals and trains. The car rental prices we got were pretty ordinary. We saved a bit by paying for it right away instead of at pick-up time. We also saved a lot by renting the smallest car we could fit in and not buying extra insurance. Many people insist upon the piece of mind that comes with the insurance but that can almost match the cost of the car. So we rely on the credit card coverage and drive cautiously. As for trains; it was tempting to consider rail passes of some sort. But some further research confirmed that we could spend less simply buying point-to-point tickets. We could save even more by planning ahead and buying then as soon as they become available online. We got three legs of our journey this way, each for only $52 for the five of us. That's a steal. We payed much larger sums for the two overnight train legs in the east, which we could not buy ahead of time. But that cost was offset by the fact that they also served as our lodgings for those two nights.

Lodging: We kept our lodging costs very low (only $120/night) by using quite a few hostels and some carefully chosen B&B's, small hotels, and rentals that had "family" rooms that could accommodate all five of us. Any time you have to get two rooms, the costs soar. So we booked most of our lodgings six months ahead of our departure to ensure we could find those rare rooms for five. We had mixed luck with the hostels. Some were fantastic (Bacharach and Krakow), some were only mediocre (Bruges and Rothenburg), and some were questionable (Vienna and Cesky Krumlov). But all provided at least decent accommodation for a good price, and were family-friendly, too.

Food: In the past we have saved a great deal of money on food by preparing our own food in week-long cottage rentals. This time we were hampered by the fact that we only had one 5-day rental where it was practical to make our own hot meals. Instead, we made sure to eat a good, filling breakfast at each lodging, and then to either eat a small, snacky lunch or prepare a picnic lunch with grocery store food. Then we would try to find a reasonably priced place for a sit-down casual dinner. We managed to keep food costs to $55/day for the whole family. Pretty good considering we ate at quite a few more restaurants this year than in the past. Food was quite a bargain in Poland and rural Czech Republic. Prices were reasonable in most of Germany, too.

Entertainment/Incidentals: There are not many steps you can take to keep prices low in this category. After all, you are there to see and do things, so you are going to have to pay admission fees. Fortunately, most of the places we had to pay to visit either allowed children of a certain age for free or had "family" rates that were only slightly more than the price for two adults. We also enjoy seeing the sights that are free like (some) churches, parks and city squares and markets.

In Total: We benefited from good currency exchange rates. If the rates had been more typical of the last several years, we would have spent about $1,000 more. We were fortunate to keep the total cost of this year's trip the same as last year's even though it was five days longer (and even a bit under the costs of our trip to Scandinavia, even though this year's trip was 14 days longer). So overall, this year's trip was the best value, by far, when you calculate costs on a per-day basis. I'm pretty proud of that. It would not have been at all difficult to spend double the amount we spent simply by making different choices. Different, not fancier. Certainly, if fancy is your goal, the sky is the limit with costs.

Tomorrow I plan to do a blog entry about our overall impressions of the places we saw, what our favorite things were and what we think we will remember the most...