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What Does Bike Touring Cost?

On YouTube, I published a video about the cost of bike touring\ A lot of people actually ask that to me, because they don’t know what the average price is in different countries and how much such a trip on a bike will cost in total.

Here is the video:

So yeah, the definite answer to the question is: IT DEPENDS.

Now first I want to point out something I didn’t talk about in the video: The INITIAL COST.\ In the video I didn’t talk about the initial cost of bike touring. Now, you can find some good resources and blog posts about this topic, but I focus on the cost WHEN you are actually bike touring, provided that the initial costs are already done. (These costs only happen once in theory, when you gear up for your first bike tour, and you can use the same gear in your next tour.)

In the video, I talk about four factors which influence the cost:

Destination\ It depends where you go, different places have different prices. So do some research on that before you go! Now, I’ve visited some expensive countries in Scandinavia (Norway in particular!) and I did know that it was expensive, but not THIS expensive.. (especially Norway!) and I’ve spent quite a bit more than I wanted initially. I didn’t do that much research in advance, so that’s my fault but when I hear other people talk about their bike tours in for example Romania, they spent about 3 to 4 times less than I did in Scandinavia, and they even went to restaurants every day, which I did only once!  Yes, it can differ that much! So it is very important that you do some initial research and it’s important to gear up accordingly. For example: when you go to Scandinavia: bring a camp stove and cook your food yourself, which brings us to our second point:

Budget\ So now you know where you’re going and what to expect in price. Now it is time to create a budget. A budget is important because then you know how much you want to spend and it is less likely that the money escapes you. Now, I didn’t make a clear budget on my first tour and that way I spent about twice as much as I wanted initially. That’s also why I had to quit early (there were other reasons as well) on my bike tour.  Anyways, the questions you should ask when making a budget are for example: Do I want to eat in restaurants, or cook my own food? Am I going to stay in hotels every night, or am I going to wild camp (also depends on destination)? And of course you can make out which options are more expensive than others.\ For a normal traveler there are 3 general types of expenses: Shelter, food and transportation, but for bike tourers 2 are already covered: transportation and shelter (if you carry a tent). So if you want to go as cheap as possible, you should only have to spend money on food, which you can narrow down to a very very low cost level as well. (Tip: When going to Norway, the Kiwi supermarkets have a cheap brand called First Price, the quality might be a little less, but these products are often about 40% cheaper than the same product from another brand.)

Way of travel\ For normal travelers this could be a matter of which mode of transportation, but for bike tourers that’s already determined, so for them (and also other travelers) you could say this is about the pace of travel. On my first bike tour I was definitely a fast traveler, traveling from city to city with about 2-3 rest days every 2 weeks of cycling, especially in the beginning. Now this influenced the cost of bike travel in a good and a bad way. Good, because when I was cycling, I tended to camp during the night and leave the next morning. Bad, because every day was different, which could lead to some unexpected costs, which might be a fourth type of costs especially bike tourers can deal with. When you cycle, the chances increase that you break your bike, such as a flat tire or a broken chain, which can lead to repair costs. I didn’t have many unexpected costs, but I definitely had a few, especially some that afterwards, I could’ve prevented. So I think that as the number of bike tours progresses the amount of these costs decreases. The prime example was the 50 euros I had to pay a bike mechanic in Oslo, Norway, just for some little tweaks on my gearing and a look at my disc brake pads, which I thought were worn out, but they weren’t worn out at all, so he just put them back.. (it was actually 70 euros, but he gave me a ‘reduction’…). So slow travel might be cheaper than, but doesn’t necessarily have to, when you decide to stay in an Airbnb apartment for a month that is 30 euros a night. But it can be cheaper when you do it in a cheaper country. Anyways, for my next bike tour, I definitely want to travel slower, also because I’m gonna take on a remote job, which will mean I need to make some time to do that, which means staying longer at some places, which I think is only a good thing, because then I can have some more time to enjoy the place where I am and travel in a more relaxed way.

So there you have it, in the video I also talked about a fourth factor, which is if you are making money while traveling. I actually did make a little bit with YouTube, which I’m very proud of, but wasn’t nearly enough to cover the costs. In the future I do want to become fully sustainable and able to travel indefinitely. But this might not be the type of travel for you, so do your research on destination, what you want to spend and how you want to travel and you will have a good guess of how expensive your trip will be.

Some numbers on my first bike tour:

  • Total cost of 85 days of bike touring: €3215.76 ($4001.69)
  • Daily average: €37.83 ($47.07)
  • 5 days in the Netherlands
  • 14 days in Germany
  • 6 days in Denmark
  • 18 days in Sweden
  • 23 days in Norway
  • 7 days in Finland
  • 4 days in Estonia
  • 4 days in Latvia
  • 1 night in Lithuania
  • 3 days in Poland

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