How One Travel Writer Spent 30 Days in 9 Countries for Less Than the Cost of a Week in Paris

It was the math that sparked conversation. Last summer, a senior copywriter from Brooklyn took a plane to Paris, spent five nights at the Marriott Ambassador in the Opéra neighborhood, went to a food festival, purchased a sequined bodysuit on the way to the airport, and returned home with about $2,800 less. A freelance writer named Mira departed Lisbon around the same time, carrying a 40-liter backpack and a debit card that she had informed her bank about. After thirty days, she had traveled to nine different countries for less money than the trip to Brooklyn in five.

There are two ways to read that. Either slow, scrappy travel still works if you’re willing to give up the bathtub, or Paris has become ridiculously expensive. Most likely, both are accurate.

Over the course of several phone conversations, Mira shared her spreadsheet, which reads like a subdued critique of the contemporary travel-influencer playbook. Whenever possible, she avoided taking flights. The night bus ride from Lisbon to Madrid cost €29. She took a regional train from Madrid into the south of France, then traveled through Italy on the kind of slow services that tourists seldom take because they take six hours rather than two. She managed Croatia and Slovenia on FlixBus. Speaking with her gives me the impression that she takes pleasure in the inefficiency. The truckers eating sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap, the woman knitting silently beside her for three hours, and the Zagreb bus station at six in the morning all contribute to the journey rather than the interludes.

The gap truly becomes apparent when it comes to accommodations. Given how sharply prices have increased since the Olympics, the Brooklyn copywriter’s $250 per night in Paris is a reasonable amount by 2025 standards. Mira’s average was more like $32. She spent four nights house-sitting for a retired British couple in Provence, feeding their cat and watering a seemingly erratic fig tree. She paid €14 for a six-bed room in a hostel close to Keleti station in Budapest, which she claimed had a subtle cumin scent. She needed to file a story in Prague and didn’t want to share a desk, so she paid an additional €38 for a private room.

Food had a similar trend. She never dined at a restaurant with tablecloths. She did, however, eat exceptionally well because anyone who can enter a grocery store and put together a meal is still rewarded in Europe. For €5, you can get bread, cheese, a tomato, and a bottle of local product. Before everyone began taking pictures of tasting menus, travel writers used to romanticize this type of dinner.

It’s important to note that she didn’t witness everything. She did not attend Versailles. She stayed out of the Louvre. She acknowledges, with a hint of guilt, that she continued walking past the Pantheon in Rome because she wanted gelato and the line was lengthy. The trade is that. Rarely do you get both depth and scale.

The scope of what her month truly demonstrates is more limited than the headline implies. It’s not that Paris is expensive; people will continue to pay because Paris is Paris. The reason for this is that the gap between how Europe is marketed by the travel industry and how it is still possible to travel there has grown to the point of collapse. Mira tumbled through it. She was a little underweight, exhausted, and already making plans for the next one when she got home.