Travel Italy On A Budget
Money Saving Tips for Traveling Italy
Many journalists and bloggers list generic travel saving tips like traveling in off-season, using hostels, or even avoiding public transport. One thing everyone agrees on is that Italy is best explored slowly. Enjoying the Tuscan sun, coastal breezes, or cheap glass of wine is a travelers dream. We hope to help you save for that nightly cup of gelato or second glass of wine. After months of combined travel through Italy, here are our more specific tips on saving money when traveling Italy.
Never pay for water! Most major Italian cities have public fountains where you can fill up a water bottle. Rome is the most famous example, but we found this to be true in many others. Worst case, ask for tap water.
Unless you need to visit a remote location, you probably don’t need to rent a car. And trust me, you probably won’t want to drive after experiencing the creativity of Italian driving and parking.
Some bloggers suggest avoiding a bus and/or a metro pass. We entirely disagree! Bus and metro passes are absolutely worth every penny. Italian public transportation is reliable and saves you tons of money over taxis or Ubers. I promise you won’t want to walk everywhere.
Many museums offer free or discounted days. This requires planning ahead, but the savings are very significant!
Use free beaches instead of private beaches. They’re generally close to one another, and not paying for a beach visit means you can afford an extra cocktail afterwards. Priorities.
Visit the local churches even if you’re not religious. They’re usually free and the most impressively painted, sculpted, and designed building in any city.
Many family-owned Italian restaurants offer pasta dishes for under €10. Full sized margherita pizzas can also be found at that same cheap price.
Don’t eat at a restaurant on a plaza. They’re tourist geared and may up-charge you for even the slightest modifications or requests as reported by CNN in August 2023
Our Financial Recap of Traveling Italy
Chandni and I want to be open about our spending by recapping each country we visit with a spending discussion. For each country, we may highlight a financial success or two, but more importantly, we want to discuss how we could have been more financially efficient travelers. We hope that future travelers will learn from our self-critique and find value in our mistakes. Our first financial recap is for two weeks of travel through delicious Italy! Our spending covers travel in Rome, Cinque Terre, Parma, Modena, and Milan.
We met our financial goals for travel through Italy! We aimed to spend under $161/day and spent only $129/day. That amounts to just over $2,000 each for two weeks. Our costs include everything from our flight to Rome, all hotel costs, every bite of food, and all bus tickets bought. Two huge outliers are the costs of Osteria Francescana and my birthday celebration at the bar Drink Kong. Removing those luxury expenses reduces the cost per person to about $1,600, or $100/day.
Two expenses accounting for 20% of travel costs is terrible, but they were special occasions that won’t be repeated. Well, except for my birthday ideally. Our biggest success was using Chase Ultimate Reward points towards purchasing our flight. That turned a peak season flight from Dallas to Rome into a $150 ticket each! Tickets would have been $500 each without points. Credit card points can be tough to accumulate but they’re incredibly powerful when used for travel on the right card. We use the Chase Sapphire Reserve card for our travels and for purchasing our airline tickets. Your flight is likely the single biggest expense you can reduce by planning ahead, or by using credit card points.
Many of our friends were certain that we’d be in hostels throughout Europe. Turns out we didn’t book a one in Italy! Hostels are a fantastic way to budget travel solo, but we were traveling together. Splitting the cost of a budget hotel room was cheaper than buying two hostel beds. The $722 we each spent on hotels could have likely been lowered. However, $722 is $45/night which is the average price of hostel dorm beds I found in Rome and Milan during peak season. Not a bad deal for your own place! Opting for hotel rooms also added security, but we did lose access to a kitchen…sometimes. That leads me to our new favorite concept – renting apartments in hotel listings, and NOT from AirBnb or Vrbo.
We stayed in our first apartment in Modena which we found on Agoda. This is a huge difference because AirBnb or Vrbo tend to add hidden fees, while apartments on Agoda or Expedia have been fee free minus city taxes. Staying in apartments allows us cook groceries while keeping hotel room comforts. Cooking and not eating out helped keep our average meal cost down to only $6.84, assuming three meals a day and excluding our Osteria Francescana splurge. Fast-food value menus barely feed you that cheaply anymore! Grocery shopping is the best!
However, we’ve also unknowingly wasted plenty of money during our Italian travels.
We estimate that around $62/person was “wasted” on unnecessary expenses, bad planning, or times when we should have trusted our gut. A simple example is buying the wrong tart at a bakery. A more costly example is not buying advance tickets to the acclaimed Borghese Gallery in Rome. That mistake forced us to pay resale prices for our tickets. That $62 may not seem like much in context of $2,062, but it’s the difference of another night in a city, a fine dining meal, or groceries for days. Every mistake was significant. And did you notice that empty Health row?! Nobody got sick or damaged, hooray! Sickness was happily not a part of our unexpected expenses.
Overall, we’re happy with our financials after traveling through Italy. Could we have done better? Sure. But we ate and drank well, saw almost everything we wanted to see (we’ll see the Coliseum next time…as we say that again!), and came out under budget. Think we could have done better? Do you have any budgeting tips of your own? Leave a comment or critique below or shoot us a message!
