2023 Europe Trip: Summary and Expenses

At the end of August we wrapped up our most recent long international trip in Europe. We’ve taken many multiple month international trips in the last 5 years, but this one was really special (why? keep reading).

If you haven’t read about our prior trips and the associated expenses, you may be interested in those as well:

5 months traveling around the world in 2018 – $37/day (average for my expenses)
4 months traveling around Europe in 2019 – $46/day (average for my expenses)
2 months traveling around Mexico in 2021 – $56/day (average for my expenses)
2.5 months traveling around Latin America in 2022 – $85/day (average for my expenses)
9 weeks traveling around the world in 2022 – $143/day (average for my expenses)

We’ve also gone on lots of long domestic trips all over the US between the international trips, where I tracked my expenses as well, but I won’t list out all of those here. If you’re interested in those, you can find all of the articles on the US Travel Adventures page of the site.

So with all of the long trips we’ve taken, why was this one special? There are two big reasons.

We embarked on this trip right after our wedding, so this was essentially a really long, really awesome Honeymoon. And also this trip included several bucket list destinations that we’d been waiting to visit due to cost. As you’ll see, this trip certainly wasn’t cheap compared to our prior trips, especially the ones between 2018-2021 when we were really trying to travel on a budget.

I already wrote an article about the first 2.5 weeks of this trip where we explored many wonderful areas of Switzerland, so if you haven’t read that yet, you can check it out here.

This article will focus mainly on the rest of the countries we visited after Switzerland along with all of my expenses for those countries, with a summary of the entire trip expenses at the end. Let’s get into breaking down the trip and all of these expenses.

Trip Breakdown

This was our initial itinerary plan when we started planning the trip at the beginning of the year:

Switzerland: ~2.5 weeks
Liechtenstein: day trip from Zurich
Slovenia: ~5 days
Latvia: ~5 days
Estonia: ~5 days
Finland: ~1 week
Sweden: ~1.5 weeks
Norway: ~ 1.5 weeks
Denmark: ~1.5 weeks

When we left the US, we had less than half of the trip booked so that we could be flexible if we decided to change anything or if any crazy situations came up while traveling. We learned our lesson on booking things too far in advance when our 5 month 2020 trip got cancelled due to Covid. We had most of that trip planned and booked, which led to a lot of lost time and money when cancelling all of those flights and accommodations.

We mostly stuck to the original itinerary this time, but we did make some changes. Some based on feedback and recommendations we got from followers on Instagram, and some due to forced changes from delayed and cancelled flights. We had more issues with flights on this trip than in all of our prior trips combined, which led to some less than ideal situations. Here’s what our actual itinerary looked like:

Switzerland: 2.5 weeks
Liechtenstein: day trip from Zurich
Serbia: 1 day
Slovenia: 4 days
France: 1 day
Latvia: 4 days
Estonia: 5 days
Finland: 5 days
Norway: 3 weeks
Denmark: 6 days
Sweden: 6 days

We got lots of feedback about how amazing Norway is and all the things to do there, so we added a lot more time there and cut down time in the other Nordic countries. That was a great decision, and we’re glad we did it. Norway was neck and neck with Switzerland in terms of the natural beauty and outdoor activities.

As for the one day each in Serbia and France… those were due to flight mishaps. In both cases, a lengthy flight delay caused a missed connection and resulted in us having to spend a day and night in those countries. While these were both major inconveniences, they could have been much worse. The airlines paid for our hotels and food, and we also got partial reimbursements for the flights from submitting travel insurance claims.

Below are my expenses for this trip. Stay tuned for Whitney’s post about all the fun things we did on the trip, but for now I’ll focus on the expenses incurred for the remainder of our time in Europe after Switzerland. Keep in mind that all of the expenses that I’ll talk about below are my expenses only, since Whitney and I have quite different spending habits at times. We split all shared expenses evenly, so I calculate the numbers below with my half of the shared expenses and then my individual expenses.

Expense Breakdown

We went into this trip knowing it would be expensive and didn’t really have any clear budget in mind. The only goal was to do as much hiking and exploring as we could and to enjoy our time together. While we certainly did our best to minimize expenses when possible, it really wasn’t a major focus this time.

Accommodation: After spending so much on accommodations in Switzerland, we were looking forward to using some credit card points to book hotels and keep our costs a little lower on the remainder of the trip. We found some pretty good free hotel options in Ljubljana, Riga, Helsinki, and Oslo. We have so many credit card points these days that even if the redemption isn’t the best, it’s often worth it to use the points instead of paying with cash. In total we used 225,500 Marriott Points and 108,000 Hilton Points to get 20 free nights. While that’s a lot of points, it saved us at least $2,500, but probably more than that considering how expensive Helsinki and Oslo were.

When hotel rewards weren’t an option, we used mostly Airbnb, but also Booking.com in a couple places where options were limited. Since we were booking much of this trip only a couple weeks in advance, there were several times when we had very few accommodation options, and the ones that were available were very expensive. Although not ideal, that’s a price we’re willing to pay for flexibility these days.

My total accommodation expenses for this part of the trip: $2,140
My total accommodation expenses including Switzerland: $3,750

Food and drink: We cooked whenever possible on this trip, but we were often out all day and limited on time. We also rarely had a fully equipped kitchen, even at the nicer Airbnbs where we stayed. The food costs in Slovenia, Latvia, and Estonia were reasonable, but once we got to the Nordic countries, things got very expensive again. Some of the small towns we stayed in while driving around Norway had few options for food and were almost always overpriced. We also splurged on a few nicer dinners throughout the trip, since it was our Honeymoon after all!

My total food/drink expenses for this part of the trip: $1,120
My total food/drink expenses including Switzerland: $1,790

Transportation: Transportation costs were higher on this trip than on our usual trips because public transportation was limited in many of the places we visited. In the more mountainous and remote areas where we went in Norway, getting around by Uber or public transportation just wasn’t possible. When public transportation was available, it was much more expensive than most of the other countries we’ve visited. We rented a car on two separate occasions in Norway for about two weeks in total, which added up quickly. Gas and tolls were also much more expensive than we were used to. We were paying over $9/gallon and we drove a lot.

We used airline miles for our flights to and from Europe which saved a lot, but the flights between countries there were more expensive than we expected. On our 2019 trip, it wasn’t uncommon to get flights between European countries for $40/person or less, but that wasn’t the case this year. Most of the flights were $200/person or more. Buses and ferries between countries were cheaper, but not feasible on much of the trip due to distance.

My total transportation expenses for this part of the trip: $2,850
My total transportation expenses including Switzerland: $3,430

Activities: This was the lowest cost category by a lot on this trip. Most of our time in each place was spent hiking and walking around the different areas, so we didn’t need to spend a lot of money on activities. We did do a guided walking tour in most of the cities that we visited though, so we paid tips for that. We also did some day trips to nearby areas, plus went to some museums and castles, and did a half day kayaking tour. We also paid to go to the gym a few times, and some of the hikes that we did had fees for parking that I included here.

I also included our souvenirs, gifts for family/friends, and travel insurance in this section of expenses.

My total activity expenses for this part of the trip: $610
My total activity expenses including Switzerland: $665

This brings my total expenses for the entire trip (about 10 weeks), including accommodations, transportation, activities, and food/drink to approximately $9,635! This comes out to an average of $138/day!*

*Keep in mind this is only my half of the expenses, and does not include Whitney’s expenses.

Summary of My Expenses

To my surprise, we actually spent slightly less on a per day basis on this trip than on our 9-week around the world trip last year. The total cost was just slightly more for this 10-week trip at $9,635 for my part (vs. $9,423 on the last trip for my expenses). The fact that this trip was just slightly lower cost was mostly due to being able to get our flights to and from Europe for free with airline miles and the 20 free hotel nights using credit card points. Without that, I probably would have spent about $2,000 more for my half of those expenses on this trip compared to last trip, because we certainly visited a lot more expensive countries!

For the cost, this trip was well worth it. We had some amazing adventures, especially in Switzerland and Norway, and saw the most amazing views of our lives. Whitney and I really enjoyed our time together, and it was about the right amount of time for everything that we wanted to do and see. There really isn’t much I would change about the trip or the itinerary, although a few less flight mishaps would have been nice.

What’s Next?

We went into planning this trip thinking it would probably be our last long international trip for the foreseeable future. We’ve been thinking a lot about kids lately, and now that we’ve gone just about everywhere that we wanted to go when we started these long trips back in 2018, this seems like the time. We talked about this a lot while on the trip though, and ultimately decided that there is still one last long international trip that we want to take before then. We’re currently starting to plan that trip for the beginning of 2024, so stay tuned! We’ve been very active on Instagram and on our Facebook page lately, so be sure to follow there for all of our best travel pictures!