Interrailing Series - Accommodation and Budget

This is the second part to my Interrailing series and I will be discussing accommodation and budget within this one (probably the most time consuming and difficult part of the trip). 
I want to give you some tips to try and make this process as painless as possible, starting with accommodation aspect to the trip. 

Accommodation 

One of the most important parts of the trip to some! I say to some due to the fact that some people like to live very spontaneously and choose to not book any accommodation in advance and just take each day as it comes. This is a good way to do it as it allows you to choose how many days you want to say in each place depending on how much you are enjoying it at the time. 
However, for me this gives me complete anxiety. "What happens if you get there and there are no rooms left anywhere? What of we end up having to sleep on the streets? We are going to die!" 
So, obviously, when planning our trip we decided to book accommodation in advance. 

Another decision to make when thinking about accommodation is what type of place you want to stay in. There are many options, must including hostels, hotels or airbnbs. 
At the start, our plan was to stay in hostels for every place that we were visiting and staying in dorms for most of the trip and private rooms occasionally. However, the more we researched into other options we found that in some cases, hotels ended up being cheaper than staying in a hostel dorm, so for us this was perfect! 

 Airbnb's are another option, however we did not end up choosing to stay in any. They can be in the form of a private room within a house or apartment or you can choose to rent the whole house or apartment for a duration of time. Airbnb's are often very well presented 'instagramable' places to stay and so sometimes can be a little bit expensive. However, if you don't mind staying in an average room that has your basic needs, they can be quite inexpensive and worth looking into. 

Top tips for booking accommodation online 

1. When booking online, websites like booking.com and hostelworld.com can be very useful as they gather up a lot of hotels and hostels in an area for you and show you how many stars they are and also some visitors reviews along with pictures of the property. They also often have deals on hotels/hostels which are usually very reasonable.

2. I strongly suggest when researching places to stay that when you find somewhere, before booking, please look up reviews! Tripadvisor.co.uk is a great website for getting a real outlook on an accommodation option as people will post their real life experiences with the property. Do not rely on the images shown to you by booking.com, as sometimes they can be deceiving (personal experience unfortunately). 

3. Another thing I always ensure when booking online, is that if there is any doubt at all, I book the refundable option. I know how tempting it is when you can see that the non-refundable option is cheaper, but trust me, if anything goes wrong, I would rather pay more to be able to get my money back.

Budget 

So, once you have purchased your Interrail tickets and arranged all accommodation, it is time to plan how much you need to save to bring with you!
For us, we originally suggested €50 per day, so for 19 days, that is €950. We then discussed how in some places we probably wouldn't spend this much per day due to places like Kraków and Prague being cheaper than for example Amsterdam or Paris. So then we decided to add and additional €250 in case of an emergency, bring us to €1,200, so around £1,000. 

To be fair, we haven't got a clue whether this budget is too high or too low. We are more so going with the idea of bringing what we have and making it work. 


With the £1,000 spending money, the £240 for the Interrail pass and around £450 each for accommodation, that brings our overall costs of the holiday to £1,690.

I hope if you are planning an Interrail trip that my budget somewhat helps you on deciding yours and give you some sort of guideline!

I just highly recommend saving as much as possible up until the trip and going with as much as you can and having the best time. Although, I also know that you can do this kind of trip with a much lower budget and still have as great of a time!




My next blog post in this series will be within the month leading up to the trip and will be discussing all essentials to bring and packing (so exciting!!).


Thank you so much for reading this blog post, I hope you are enjoy this Interrail series and feeling inspire to go on a trip like this yourself.
Siobhan McKerr x