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Home » RTW Travel » Getting around Europe can be cheap

Getting around Europe can be cheap

Europe can be a real budget drainer of a continent, especially if you spend much time in the northern half on your RTW trip. For the most part, the further north in Europe you are the more expensive things are, and that goes for transportation as well. It’s not just that the distances in the north are farther between each city, it’s also that each kilometer is more expensive as well.

Should you get a Eurail Pass for your RTW?

Unless you will be traveling around the northern half of Europe for a while it’s probably not worth it, but if you are hitting Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Germany it can be a big money saver. There are some cheaper ways of getting around, as we’ll discuss below, but in that part of Europe the train and a Eurail Pass are probably the best ways of going.

Buses in Europe are cheaper and better than you probably realize

Forget the Greyhound buses if you are from North America. In Europe they have Eurolines buses and they are quite nice, clean, and professional, and not nearly as depressing as Greyhound. They connect like 500 major cities and have routes that connect most of the larger ones at least once per day. They are usually slower than trains, but not too much slower and they are also usually quite a bit cheaper.

A typical Eurolines fare can be 30-50% cheaper than the 2nd class train fare, so if you have quite a bit of time and you want to stretch your RTW they can be a valuable part of your strategy. And other buses, especially the ones in Spain and Italy, cover many places that the trains don’t go. Often your only method for getting to your next city is a bus, and fortunately they are usually very prompt and quite cheap.

Taking the bus across the English Channel

This isn’t the fastest way to get from England to the continent, but it’s usually the cheapest. There are actually quite a few ways of connecting bus trips from Paris, Brussels, or Amsterdam to London. If you go to a travel agency in London or Amsterdam you’ll find that you can take a bus that gets loaded on board a ferry and then carries on again on the other side. There are also buses that literally get loaded on board the Eurostar trains that drive through the Channel Tunnel, and then they drive off once on the other side. Either of these methods will be far cheaper than booking yourself a seat on the Eurostar train itself. Sure, it will take half a day instead of 3 hours, but on a RTW you’ll often have much more time than money so it can be a worthwhile adventure.

Also, check the Eurolines website for specials because they often have really good deals between certain cities and these can be shockingly cheap if you get lucky and they are going your way.

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