Europe Feb26

A ten-day journey around southern and central Europe – from London to France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and back to London.

Trip overview

Trip summary and learnings

• Rail services in Europe, just like the UK, have a tendancy to completely fall over – as they did in Austria (one of the most reliable rail networks in Europe) – after heavy snow – adding nearly five hours of delay to our journey.
• 10 days is a long time – travelling around constantly during that time would have been incredibly taxing. Time to rest in Venice and Vienna particularly – days where we hardly travelled by train – was incredibly worthwhile.
• The Nightjet is no Caledonian Sleeper – which seems to be the European gold standard in general commercially available sleeper train products.
• The Nightjet mini-cabin is a great concept for individuals, but especially for partners – being able to join ‘rooms’ is super useful and comforting.
• The Italian regional rail network needs some new trains. We didn’t have the opportunity to travel on the high speed network (the trains we caught were all supplied by SBB CFF FFS), but we did regionally, and we definitely noticed the age and poor cleanliness.
• Switzerland’s onboard Wi-Fi application is very strange – requiring you to hold a Swiss mobile phone contract, and use an app to connect to the train wirelessly. Use your signal as normal and SBB CFF FFS (the state operator) will refund the portion of the bill used on the service to you. A sign of trust of the national operator that 4G and 5G connections onboard are so reliable (which they very much are)

Finance overview

• Most countries visited have an average cost of living, the standouts being Switzerland and Austria
• Sian and I budgeted £2,209.00 for the trip
• We ended up spending £2,131.00, a £78.00 underspend
• This was mostly led by an increase in costs for city public transport and activities vs budget, and a decrease in costs for food vs budget
• Trains were so affordable thanks to rail staff international travel benefits and Sian’s Interrail pass, the latter of which was the majority of the transport costs.

Category	Budget	Actual	Difference
Hotel	£748.00	£755.00	-£7.00
Train	£573.00	£533.00	-£44.00
Food	£765.00	£538.00	+£227.00
Activities and Incidentals	£123.00	£305.00	-£182.00
	£2,209.00	£2,131.00	-£78.00

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