I wouldn’t claim to be a Five-Star Hotel kind of guy.
Since we always like to stretch our budget (both when using miles & points and when paying), an easy way to save money during a trip is by staying at budget accommodations like guesthouses, hostels and with airbnb. I’m not saying that we don’t like nice hotels, we just don’t like paying for them. I also find that when staying at hostels and other budget places we get much more honest travel advice/ info about the area we are visting.
For example (some of you might have heard me say this before), if I ask a hostel for a recommendation on a place to eat, they likely send me somewhere they would eat. When I ask the same question in an upscale hotel, I am usually told about their in-house restaurant.
Our best strategy these days is to mix up budget stays with nicer-properties booked with points. This way we get the best of both worlds.
If you happen to be more of a Five-Star Hotel kind of traveler, Thrillist has a great list for you (based on a study by Kayak).
Thrillist wrote an interesting article, These 10 European Cities Have the Cheapest Five-Star Hotels.
When thinking of cheapest European cities for Five-Star hotels, I’d probably pick cheaper places to visit like Baltics, Balkans and Eastern Europe.
Here are the 10 Cheapest Cities for Five-Star Hotels along with the average price per night:
- Warsaw, Poland- $136
- Thessaloniki, Greece- $141
- Bucharest, Romania- $159
- Athens, Greece- $169
- Lisbon, Portugal- $183
- Budapest, Hungary- $185
- Brussels, Belgium- $198
- Prague, Czech Republic- $224
- Berlin, Germany- $235
- Madrid, Spain- $250
I’ve been to 5/10 cities which made this list.
The most recent city that we visited from this list is Bucharest. We used points to stay at the Radisson Blu since the budget options seemed really awful.
What kind of accommodations do you usually stay at while traveling?
Find out more about the 10 Cheapest European Cities for Five-Star Hotels here.
Thanks for the post on cheap five-star hotels. I prefer to spend money on airfare rather than hotels, but I like at least three-star accommodations. Based on my experience, I must disagree with many of the rates (or at least require more information on how these prices were calculated). I agree that Warsaw and Budapest offer outstanding values for hotels, but the rates for Greece and Prague seem ridiculously low even if those rates were Euros not dollars. And the Kayak study claims these are average rates not the least expensive ones. I’d love to get these rates at three- or four- star hotels in many of these cities.
Wow, Prague has really gone up, as has Berlin it seems like. Never been to the first, and stayed in a budget option in 2007 in the second. Maybe I should have planned better!