2 weeks in France expenditures

You did very well on lodging and food especially considering you seem to have stayed in hotels and not apartments.

I am about to finish the math on our 7-week, 2-country trip but I think we stayed under $100/day for food even though we spent 3 weeks in Switzerland. We had one apartment that was a splurge for us, and one 2-night hotel splurge. Ya' gotta treat yourselves now-and-then.

I should really sit down and figure mine out - I have an expense app where I kept track of everything...that would be a good weekend project for me!

Why spoil a good trip by working out how much it cost.

Great, helpful info, thanks, though Bob has a good point, too. ;) I just wanted to say that I have used booking. com without any complaints. However, when I can, I book directly with the property. This often gets me a lower rate or some little perk and the property earns more money. For me, this is a way to help some of these smaller properties survive. I also tend to do some emailing with the properties before I arrive and booking thru them sets up a dialog. Questions like, the best way to get from the train station, advice on prepurchase of tickets, location of food markets, anything else that comes up. I just recently asked the innkeeper in Grazelema, Spain, advice on parking in Zahara where we will stop on the way. Not only did he answer that question, he provided some sight seeing tips, and directions for the scenic route to his property. Also, it hasn't happened, but I would imagine that communication with the property prior to arrival might signal some red flags which could indicate a change of property might be a good idea. Lastly, I reconfirm directly with the property, a couple weeks before my stay so that there are no surprises. So while booking.com has its place ,I just would suggest contacting the inn directly when possible.

Since we were booking so close to our stay, and only received emails when on wifi, booking.com allowed us more flexibility to book without waiting for a response. We were traveling with my brother and sister in law, and were following their style of flexible travel and hotel reservations.. When booking further in advance, i try to book direct directly with hotel.

I like knowing how much we spent because I'm just nerdy like that...it's interesting to me to see how much we spent on food/accoms/whatever.

I like to know costs too. @Nicole....what is the app you use to keep track of costs?

I keep everything on Quicken, and just code items to specific trips (like "Vienna 2017") as they are downloaded from my credit card statements. ATM cash withdrawals posted from bank statement. But I don't look at the total costs until the trip is done - we just have a feeling for expense levels we're comfortable with, and agree on an occasional "splurge."
So I can't say x on meals, y on entertainment -- just $xxxx for four weeks. (Easy to break out airfare, trains, car rental, hotels -- it's that "cash" portion that gets messy.)

I jot down expenses in a little spiral notebook that stays in my hotel room. I'm not sure why, except that I also note the names of hotels and restaurants, and occasionally I want to mention one of those places on this forum. Without my notebook I wouldn't remember what I ate or where I ate it. I'd be reduced to consulting Google Maps, and I wouldn't be able to say anything at all about costs.

I do that as well, acraven...then transfer into my budget app. And I do usually like to put the restaurant and whatnot...then when I go back and am doing up my trip memories, it helps me to remember a little clearer what we did that day.

I did use an app that was just called Spending...it is nice because you could categorize items (food, transport, souvenirs) and then see a pie chart/percentages.

Last trip I used one called Fudget. It's nice and basic...but I do kinda miss being able to categorize, but it's no muss no fuss.

For the record, our trip in July with about 12 nights, in France and London, for 2, (including airfare) was about $6800 cdn. (Approx 5200 USD). Airfare to get to Europe was $2000 of that. Plus we had airfare within Europe and a car rental.

So I was checking my Fudget budget and there is a chart! But you can’t categorize, but I did see that our flight over was 30% of the budget...toss in our Brit Air flight and our seat selections and I’m sure just airplanes was just over 40% of our trip. Our round trip BA flight was about 575, seat selection 115, and seat selection on Air Canada 225 (yes, it was worth it...paid extra for the extra leg room seats).

Our accoms were about 950 cdn $ (Nice 1 nt 140...Salon 4 nts 300...Manosque 3 nts 165...London 3 nts 350)

Tolls and parking €100 Gas €175 (I later did a mass conversion of € & £ to cdn $ to get my approx total). Car rental ran about $550 cdn.

Food...in the south of France we actually did ok (I’m including things like slushies and snacks purchased while sightseeing and groceries purchased for eating at Airbnb) averaging about $60 cdn a day ($30 each). We did some of our own cooking, which helped a lot...a bag of pasta and sauce was a couple bucks and made 3 meals.

London was a whole other matter. Our exch rate sucks and for our 3 nights there (including eating at the airport on arrival and departure day) we averaged $120 (one meal alone was about 80 cdn, but we said the hell with it).

Nice to see documentation of how it is done as many on this site ask for estimates. For many yrs now in europe i have been averaging no more than 150 usd per day pp when 2 are traveling. Some with car rental and train incl. As costs are increasing i have actually tried hostels in switzerland. I have been pleased and find them efficient , clean, and economical. I never thought i would turn to them but many are highly rated. And even as a senior it was fine to stay there. Ie. Ehrenberg, Laussane all were private rooms but share on showers.
Not a prob. It has always been summer time and i never had trouble getting a shower avail.

I often forget to compare against what I would have spent anyway had I remained at home. That is a good point and a good thing to remember! That some of the money you're spending, you would have spent anyway.