Spent $5.5K CAD on a 36 day solo trip in Europe, July 2025

Hello! I finally took the time to compile all of my spending data during my 36 day trip to Europe this past summer into sankey diagrams, and thought that it would be a helpful frame of reference for anyone looking to plan their budget for a similar trip. The itinerary of places I visited is a little unconventional and not the most efficient, but I'd set out to visit the few cities that held my interest the most instead of staying in one country for the whole trip, since it'll probably be a long time until I visit Europe again.

About me:

  • 19F from Canada
  • Third year university student
  • My experience of Europe consists of a short family cruise around parts of the UK/ Amsterdam two years ago
  • Trip summary:
  • France: Paris, 4 nights
  • France: Rennes, 11 nights
  • England: London, 4 nights
  • Italy: Florence, 6 nights
  • France: Paris, 7 nights
  • Spending priorities: excursions > souvenirs > food > accommodation. Essentially, I wanted to see as many new sights as I could, and never held back on buying gifts for my friends and family. I would say I tried not splurging on food for the most part (except for when I was in Florence and was having gelato for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), but I was eating out at least once a day. I was absolutely frugal with my accommodations, yes, and no, I don't regret it.
  • Methods of payment: Apple Pay (Wealthsimple Mastercard), or with cash (left over from aforementioned cruise)
  • Additional: My time in Rennes was part of a summer study abroad program lasting 10 days, from July 8th - 18th. Since I study at a partner school of the university at Rennes, the price of my course was the same as all the other ones in my degree. (This was a blessing - if I were considered an "international student" my course fee would've been 2-3x as expensive.) I decided not to list the price of the course in the $5.5K given that I needed it to graduate and would've paid it anyway, but for those who are curious, the course was roughly $750. I did include the school application fee (the brown stem) since I wouldn't had to pay that if I took the course in my home institution.

About the data:

  • At the end of every day, I'd record every purchase I made on Excel
  • If I bought something on day A for day B, I would only count it on day B. This happened with lots of tickets since I did a lot of planning while I was ALREADY abroad (obviously, I don't recommend this because while tickets are generally the same price, you end up wasting time you could've spent sightseeing), and also for things like insurance or museum passes where I divided the sum by the total number of days it was active for
  • For cash purchases, I'd search up "x euros in CAD" for the day and put down that number
  • For card purchases, I'd subtract the cash back I got from my Wealthsimple card before noting it down on Excel
  • The derivative sankey diagrams are meant to provide insight on how much is being spent per day excluding costs of getting there, since this will vary depending on where you're coming from

Categories:

  • Accommodation: Hostels for all of the trip except for Rennes, where I got a room through AirBnB. I picked hostels based on their location vs cost - ratings were not a large contributing factor for my picks. They could've been cleaner, but I honestly didn't mind the rattiness of some of them because I was only there for a couple hours each night to shower and sleep anyway.
  • Excursions: I'm a huge fan of anime conventions so I went to both Paris Japan Expo and HyperJapan (London). Outside of that, the costs here include tickets for many generic touristy things for each respective city. I visited a great deal of museums and found that both museum passes I bought (Florence Card and Paris Museum Pass) to be IMMENSELY cost-efficient.
  • Flights: Round trip from YYC to CDG via Air Canada. This category also includes the price of any Flixbuses/ trains I took between each city. It does not include the Flixbus costs of my day trips - I have those under "Transit."
  • Food: ate out at restaurants and shared food with friends, so I got to try lots of dishes in Rennes without spending a fortune. Made a couple of trips to Lidl/ other grocery stores, and the rest of this amount is propped up by TooGoodToGo bags. The app is absolutely goated in Florence and Paris due to the variety of different bakeries and walkability of the cities. Also, discount sections at the grocery stores in London are insanely good value from what I saw.
  • Other: Insurance, data, luggage storage, etc. I made a point to never pay for water or to use the restroom. I also could've saved here if I did my laundry at one of the hostels that offered it for free, but waited and ended up having to spend money at the laundromat.
  • Souvenirs: This could've been a lot lower honestly, but I like to splurge on things for other people. I went on a shopping spree on the last day of Paris where I purchased some crazy expensive tea and chocolate for my parents from Galeries Lafayette. If you wanted to save in this area, some unique but affordable souvenirs are museum coins or pressed pennies! I really wanted to get a penny of the Harrod's bear in London but didn't have any GBP on me
  • Transit: I tried to walk as much as I could, so this is mostly composed of the bus tickets for my day trips. London, being less walkable and ridiculously large, meant that I was taking the tube daily. (Great system though - super convenient tap-to-pay system at the gates which caps automatically, and trains have essentially no wait times)
  • Lifestyle: hand soap (first hostel had none), sunscreen, charging cable (mine broke mid-trip while I was in London, which forced me to make a trip to Poundland because everywhere else they were nearly $40CAD), power bank, etc.

Anyway - that's the gist of my trip. I like to track my spending and seeing the data so this was very fun for me to do. Let me know if you have any questions! If you're wondering about my itinerary for each city, I'm planning to make posts about each place separately soon. Hopefully this was interesting to see and helpful in some way! Cheers.

Author: tralalatrip