May 14, 2024
High Finance
We usually title this page in our blogs "What it Cost", but that seems to relegate all the wonderful places we stayed, foods we found, ferries and trains we got on, etc. as just boring cost items. By calling this "High Finance" we mean to portray the things we bought as "highs". But there is another nuance here - the amounts are somewhat "high" compared to the past, though mercifully they did not need to be "financed".
In 2018, our "Tour de France" cost about 10,000 euros (excluding airfare and insurance). By 2022, the "Iberian Inquisition" and "Cross Europe" came in about 11,500 euros, and this time as we'll see, we are at 12,000 euros. That's higher, but not insane?
One thing, in 2018 we spent zero on bike repairs and maintenance. Perhaps we are (literally) paying for that now, since this time it cost 753 euros to keep going.
Let's look at some of the facts:
The total cost of the trip, for 90 days, but excluding airfares and health insurance, was about 12,000 euros. That's about 130 euros per day. Other cycle tourists, and other general tourists, let us know in the comments how that compares to your experience. And hey, if we had $75 left, we could buy a vintage 1970 edition of Arthur Frommer's "Europe on $5 a Day"!
Airfare will vary greatly depending on where people are coming from, and health insurance depends a lot on age. Even so, I will include our own numbers in the chart below, since they of course are what is most meaningful to us. For the record (our record) airfare was 1285 euros and health insurance 1167 euros (two old folks, 90 days).
Another trick involving what column to put things in comes from the phenomenon of "breakfast included" with hotels. On this trip, almost exactly half of hotel stays had breakfast included. That can range, of course, from a fabulous huge buffet to a croissant and orange juice carefully set before you by the cautious hotel operator. In general, though, an included breakfast brought lots of food. In such cases, we found it really cut our food costs for the rest of the day. We decided to value an included breakfast at 20 euros on average. (However, quite often when a hotel would offer breakfast as an extra cost option, they would price it up to 15 euros each.)
We took this into account by transfering 20 euros from the hotel cost and over to the food cost, for the cases where the hotel cost included the food. This juggling involved 900 euros of breakfast food, so it was actually quite significant. The impact was greatest in Spain, where almost 3/4 of the stays had breakfast included. This compares to France, where fewer than 1/4 of stays had breakfast included, and in general those were rather weak.
Another sort of tricky accounting area involved bike repairs. If your tire rips and you spend 50 euros on a replacement, well that is an expense and it should just be recorded normally. But if you get into the area of buying a new bike, or of estimating bicycle depreciation, then you might need an accounting degree to deal with it. As it happens, I do have an accounting degree, but I am still not tempted to get fancy here. The topic does come up, because after 22,000 km (over several trips) our bikes decided to need a fair bit of special maintenance. This took the form of new drive train parts, deep regreasing of the hub gears, lots of brake pads, brake hydraulic fluid, some internal Magura brake caliper parts, and four new Schwalbe tires. These tidbits added up to somewhere over 1000 euros. Given that the bikes are worth about 3000 euros each new, the cost is not that bad, considering that they had given us seven trips since 2018. But, should 1000 euros be chalked up in the costs of this trip?
In a lazy way that would not have been appreciated by any of my past teachers, I have just sort of randomly included about 750 euros here. I am hoping the remainder will slip down a crack somewhere and I will not have to think about it!
One thing that might as well be noted here, is that after my rear hub imploded at Orleans, the repair cost was 175 euros. That one was the fault of the shop in Nantes. But Remy, owner of the Nantes Sardines workshop, reached out to us to reimburse the 175 euro expense. That was a really nice gesture, one they should get credit for.
Given all these various provisos, here is how the costs broke down for this trip:
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As usual, in these days of no longer camping, Hotels account for about half of the cost of cycle touring. Airfare, health insurance, and the accounting glitch - bike repair, are in there at 22%, leaving only 19% for food and 12% for everything else. Wow, it means in the unlikely event that we would live in Europe, be young enough to wild camp, and would start with decent bikes, avoid tourist sites and expensive taxi rides to them (like we did to Cordoba), then the 90 days could happen on about 35 euros a day. What a stupid calculation! Not only are those conditions never going to happen for us at our ages and given that we have to travel 8,000 km to even start cycling, but they never really applied even in the old days. So it's truly about 130 euros per day to be in this game, plus air and insurance.
On this trip we passed through three countries - Spain, then Portugal, (then Northern Spain), and France. We had the impression that of these Portugal was cheapest, for hotels and food. Let's check that:
As we see in the table, what we ended up paying for food was about the same throughout. (This is, one way or another what we ended up spending. It's related to but not directly a measure of the cost of grocery items or restaurant meals. We did feel general grocery costs were lowest in Portugal ad highest in France). But the average hotel cost (after adjusting for breakfast) in Portugal was way low, especially compared to France. What's more we felt Portuguese hotels were almost universally of higher quality.
The moral of this story, again, is that you need something like 12,000 euros to do a full 90 day bike tour in Western Europe, plus airfare and insurance. Most likely couples who enjoy one or more restaurant meals daily would need an additional 5000 or more euros over the period. However, those looking to lower costs should spend more time in Portugal, at least for the time being. And as before when we do this sort of cost page, we ask ourselves if it was worth it. Each time the answer has been yes, and as you will read in the next entry (when posted), we'll be back!
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6 months ago