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Travel Agent attended a breakfast earlier in March at New York’s Bryant Park Hotel sponsored by Central Europe Experience that demonstrated how travelers can enjoy a
Central European city for less than $100 per day, per person. And yes,
that includes hotels and three meals per day. Whether they use the euro
or local currencies, the nine featured cities (Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Salzburg, Vienna and Warsaw) are surprisingly affordable.
Six of the hotels recommended by the reps were three-star, and B&B and pensions also worked their way into the itineraries. Restaurants were touted not for their celebrity chefs, but for the authenticity of the cuisine and the opportunity to talk with the locals who regularly dine there. (No McDonalds or other fast-food joints were on the list, and all of the restaurants were representative of local cuisines.) Walking tours of the cities were promoted as a good way to experience out-of-the-way spots, and numerous free or inexpensive museums or historical sites were mentioned.
The point of the meeting was not to focus on Europe’s financial woes, but to encourage travelers to check out cities that they might have believed were too expensive for them to visit. With airlines offering great deals on flights to Europe, you can put together an itinerary for your clients that gives them a week in a capital city for less than $1,000 total. And, as a representative from Hungary pointed out, $100 per day is merely one (rather extreme) example, and numerous tours and activities didn’t make the list because they pushed the total all the way up to $120 or $130.