Paula Rooney Author

I have travelled solo three times and always keep an eye on the pennies. I was 55 when I went on my solo interrailing trip for a month, so I was a mature adult, not a teenager. My children saved money on their interrailing trip by cooking pasta in hostels. I didn’t want to do that as eating lovely food is part of my travel experience.

My thoughts are that if I can save £200 on this trip then that’s £200 towards flights, trains or ferries on the next trip.

I interrailed in 2020 and I spent £2570.50 in total for a month’s trip and £439.30 of that was on food. This was a mix of restaurants, takeaways, cooking in hostels, and snacks in my room.

So here are some of my top tips for budgeting food when it comes to travelling:

You can save a fortune by cooking some of your meals in a hostel kitchen. Not all of them – it is nice to have a treat and experience the local food culture too.

You can cook a pasta dish, open tins of chilli to warm through, or boil some eggs, etc. In the supermarket you can pick up a microwave meal for a couple of pounds rather than pay £10 for a similar meal in a restaurant and still get that hot food you sometimes crave when travelling.

You can also store cheese and milk in the fridge.

Some hostels have private rooms and access to a kitchen which is a good way of experiencing a kitchen and hostel life without sharing a bunk bed.

If you are in a hotel, hopefully there’s a kettle in your room. A kettle saves you lots of money on hot drinks. If you pick a location near the centre of town then it’s easy to pop back and make your own drinks and open a packet of biscuits. Of course, having a coffee out at a local café is a wonderful pastime that we all enjoy but you can vary it to save some money. I take a soup flask on holiday so that I can make a hot drink and take it out to a beauty spot and enjoy it.

On my three individual month-long solo trips, I have developed many ways to use a kettle, if that’s all you have. The most obvious one is a pot noodle or any soups or products from the supermarket where you only need hot water. 

You can buy a cuppa soup in a sachet and make it in your flask and add things to it. I take a wide-topped soup flask so it can double up as a food container. On my Camino trip, I added frozen peas to a soup because that’s what I was craving after weeks without vegetables. 

Recently when I was in Spain, on my third solo trip, I bought a tin of lentils because I knew I wasn’t eating enough protein. I added some of these to my packet soup which I enjoyed. I also bought an avocado and tipped the rest of the lentils over the top which made a good snack. Supermarkets do salad bowls to take away too, and you can add something you enjoy to pad it out.

If you are going to treat yourself to a meal somewhere, have a little look around and get a feel for the prices It’s often cheaper to eat your main meal in the daytime. Restaurants sometimes have a meal of the day with a drink and pudding included – have a look for these as the evening prices are often more expensive.

The prices and quality can vary as well, depending on the location of the restaurant. The ones facing the sea, river or a viewpoint don’t have to try as hard. Although that definitely doesn’t mean that every restaurant in a good spot is bad. However, if you go to the end of the street, or a row back from the front, you might get a better quality meal at a better price because they are not relying on the view. 

Enjoy your trip and save those pennies where you can.