Travel Feeder
Italy undoubtedly is one of the most popular travel destinations in Europe. It is the fifth most visited country around the world. Its rich cultural and historical features with the greatest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites to date (totally 44 of them) that inherited from different period of time, has won Italy over 40 million international arrivals each year. Unfortunately, traveling to Italy is always like a dream comes true for most of us who have limited budget for travel.
Reasons contributed to this costly visit inlcude its strong Euros, high tourist demands and high local living standard. But don’t let them stop you from visiting Italy! there are still ways to cut the overall travel cost to Italy down to a level that could fit into your available budget. These are 5 tips that may help you through your Italy travel planning and budgeting:
- Spend more days in each city of Italy. Traveling to your dream country for the 1st time need lengthy and well ahead plan. Plan longer period for the whole trip and spend more days in each day. Your average daily budget would be much lower since transportation cost plays the biggest role in Italy travel. You will have more time instead to explore further into Venice, Florence or Rome. Don’t be so ambitious as you can’t have both worlds at one time!
- You will be able to find cheaper deal and nicer authentic local street food, by staying more days in each city! Best discovery always comes last. I always found the best value food on my last day on any travel but could only hope to stay longer. With that in mind, You need to decide what would be your maximum period available for Italy travel, and your maximum allowable budget. Strive a balance in between to achieve a lower daily budget.
- Book all your local transportation and accommodations well ahead as soon as like 3 months in advance. Domestic train online booking can only be done 3 months before traveling day. So book at least 3 months ahead especially in peak season to grab the cheapest possible fares. Most likely local transport will determine your period of stay in that city of Italy. So, confirm your domestic trip before booking your accommodations. Following the above steps, you are very near and on the right track to achieve an average daily budget of 150Euro, by rule of thumbs.
- Book entrance pass and travel pass online. The longer you stay in a city, the cheaper you would get to travel around city. The best example would be Roma Pass which costs 25Euro but covers 3 days unlimited travel pass and 2 entrance passes, which carries extreme value!
- The last tips to fit the Italy travel cost into your budget is saving one meal for the another meal. After deducting all costs of transportation and accommodation, and also those expensive entrance fees, with your budget, you will know how much you could spend on each meal. An average meal in Italy costs 12Euro. If you have only budgeted 10Euro on each meal, save your lunch with 5Euro pizza plus Coke and you will have 15Euro to spend for an authentic dinner with a cup of cappuccino!
Hope these will help you to plan immediately your next travel to my favorite country of Italy.
– Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel blog
Italy, ah, what a beautiful place. Beautiful food, beautiful scenery, beautiful life – everything is just wonderful. Now, all you need to add to that wonderfulness is a great trip budget or a cheap vacation. Like Travel Feeder suggests, plan ahead and map it out. So, what are you waiting for? Go be brilliant in Italy! Happy Travels to you from Reader’s Digest!
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We ended our first day travel in Paris splendidly with an exciting day and night visit to the Eiffel Tower, as well as seeing the Sacred Coeur Cathedral both at day and night. On the second day in Paris, we woke up early, had our breakfast in hostel, and headed out to continue our Paris city exploration.
I had another look at the white Sacred Coeur church uphill. It’s still equally gorgeous under the morning sunlight.
Before catching a bus, we dropped by the Carrefour market nearby to buy some sandwiches and drinks, in case we needed some on our way. It shows you how convenient to stay in Montmartre as a tourist.
I love the serenity being on streets in the morning. We took the same bus as we did on the day before but this time we hopped off at the Place Charles de Gaulle (formerly the Place de l’Étoile). We planned to stroll along the world’s most famous shopping street, the Avenue Des Champs-Elysees.
Avenue Des Champs-Elysees is a 2km long straight avenue with up-market specialty shops, restaurants, cinemas and showrooms along its both sides towards the western end and gardens, parks and trees lining up along its eastern stretch of the street. This 10-lane-motor road with wide pedestrian walkway stretches from the Place de la Concorde with the Obelisk of Luxor in the east, to the Place Charles de Gaulle with the Triumphal Arch (Arc de Triomphe) in the west. The Avenue des Champs-Elysees also forms part of the Historical Axis of Paris.
We started our leisure walk at the Triumphal Arch. This 50m high monument is one of my top 5 favourite attraction in Paris. It was built in 1830s to honour those who fought for France during the Napoleonic Wars.
The arch is like an island sited right in the middle of Place Charles de Gaulle, surrounded by a roundabout where at least 12 motor roads are meeting here from all directions. Visitors could climb up to its roof top to oversee the whole length of Paris historical Axis, and also the Avenue Des Champs-Elysees, off course.
In order to get to its base, we need to walk through an underground tunnel.
Those names inscribed on the inside walls are French generals involved in wars.
Triumphal Arch is the head of Avenue Des Champs-Elysees, since we came from the Eastern end. As part of the Paris Historical Axis, the arch is in between the Louvre Museum and the Grand Arch of La Defence, all three lining up in a perfect straight line.
The 8th Arrondissement, Avenue Des Champs-Alysees. This road sign really worth a Million euro, in terms of its real estate value…
You will find many of the specialty shop on this street, like MontBlanc…
… Swatch Swiss watch chain store…
… as well as the local fashion flagship store, like the Louis Vuitton.
Wait a minute! Bobo is a big fans of LV. She just couldn’t resist its seduction and eventually bought a carrying bag!
Besides fashion, the avenue has plenty of cinemas, cafes and restaurants to take a rest at their outdoor sitting area.
Or have a scoop of Haagen Dazs ice cream…
We kept walking, seeing and exploring, but not really shopping as we had limited budget on spending and we didn’t have much extra space in our luggage. Don’t under estimate your luggage weight which could cost you big bomb when checking into your flight!
Another feature in the avenue is car showrooms. European car makers are putting up showrooms on this street, such as Renault…
… and Mercedes-Benz.
Further up of the Avenue Des Champs-Elysees, after passing by all those shops and buildings, we came to the stretch where trees and gardens become dominant.
There are also fountains scattered along the roadside… why is it not functioning? 
Another 2 km to walk before we could reach our next destination, the Louvre. If you think it’s still a long way to walk, take arest here and had some hot dogs.
In the middle of the park, there are many statues or monuments, like the one shown above with The Grand Palais exhibition museum behind it.
If you detour from the Champs-Elysees road into the Avenue du Mal Gallieni, you would come to the beautiful Hotel Des Invalides, which could be seen in the above photo at the far end.
Some people might prefer to rent one of these bicycles to continue their journey, though I’m not sure how it works.
At the time when we were there, it was really windy and it was so dusty and sandy that we could hardly open our eyes. Why don’t they grow some grass on those sand fields?
Finally, we reached the end of the Avenue Des Champs-Elysees at the Place de la Concorde, where you could see a high obelisque monument stood at the middle of our way. But it is not the end of our journey. We still needed to walk for another 1 km before reaching the main gate of the Louvre… though it would only be talked about in my upcomng travelogue in Paris.
This post was brought to you in partnership with Hotel Club. There are more than 865 hotels in Paris for tourists to choose from. For travelers who prefer to stay nearer to Paris attractions in city centre or the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, you may check out these hotels near Arc de Triomphe at the west end, or hotels near the Louvre Museum at the east end. – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel blog
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Continued from my day 1 story in Paris travel, we reached Gard du Nord at 12.40PM and checked into our hotel at 3.45PM. We took a rest… and went back out onto the street, with my tripod on my shoulder (you will know why I brought it out later). The first tourist spot we went [...]
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I was preparing my new year wish list when I saw these breaking news over my TV last night. I stopped writing… While Europe, America, and China are facing unprecedented heavy snow storm in many areas that halted the air and ground public transportation, Australia Queensland is facing homeless threat from the devastated flood attack [...]
Happy New Year 2011 to all my friends and travelers! I hope you all will have a wonderful year ahead with travel plans scheduled one after another. I also hope all photo travelers out there can shoot their photo of a lifetime. For me, I have so many things to achieve next year and I [...]
