Dear Reader, I’m strapped for cash. With three kids, a house renovation and a mortgage payment inflated by Trasonomics, I’m wondering if it’s possible to budget for a summer holiday in Europe on £1,500 – all inclusive of food, accommodation and transport for a week around Europe from our home in Lichfield.
That’s why our family of five is staying at the A&O Rotterdam City Hostel, which finished its refurbishment at the beginning of June. When I was younger, a hostel meant a snoring Aussie in a dorm. The new lobby has a ping pong table, babysitting services and a bar where you can get Aperol Spritz for £4. Best of all, a family room with an en suite bathroom is just £77 a night (aohostels.com).
According to data from Advantage Travel Partnership, many families pay more than £3,000 for an all-inclusive holiday in Europe, and we wanted to travel in a cheaper, more sustainable way – without flights or all-inclusive hotels – so instead we explored three northern European cities, visiting museums and markets using an Interrail pass (from £241 adults, under 11s free, interrail.eu).
Tristan Rutherford and his family calculated whether it was possible to afford a week’s European holiday for under £1,500.
Tristan Rutherford
Hostel brand A&O is like the Wetherspoons of budget accommodation. It renovates sturdy old buildings (a paper mill in Copenhagen, a post office in Leipzig) and aims to power them with 100% green energy. The German group aims to become Europe’s first net-zero accommodation chain by 2025. Most importantly, its hostels are cheap, chic, and close to the central station.
A plane-free trip to Europe starts on the P&O Hull Rotterdam ferry: the eight-year-old twins play in an arcade, go to the cinema and fall asleep to an acoustic band; the six-year-old wakes up the next morning to a dystopian wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands outside the window (from £118, poferries.com).
The next day, enjoy the maritime atmosphere by booking a harbour tour on Rotterdam’s Pancake Boat (from £21, pannenkoekenboot.nl), a quirky Dutch tour that combines a boat ride with an all-you-can-eat pancake counter and a ball pit on the deck below. Somehow it works: parents enjoy a cruise around Europe’s largest port, kids eat until they’re hungry and throw plastic balls at each other. You can learn a lot about parenting from the Dutch.
On the third morning, we try the hostel’s all-you-can-eat breakfast (there’s a theme here). The breakfast guests are mostly Gen-Z backpackers, meeting new friends and sharing stories of their adventures. There’s no smoked salmon or champagne, but there is an automatic pancake machine, and my kids make giant Scooby Snacks pancake towers layered with cheese, honey, lettuce and chocolate spread. I sneakily make myself a salami sandwich for lunch.
A family room with bathroom at the A&O Rotterdam costs £77 per night.
In A&O’s 38 hostels across Europe, children under seven stay free and with breakfast, and families make up about 15% of guests. Most hostels have a kids’ corner with board games, books, toys and interactive screens. Another advantage is that large families with up to four children can cram into one family room.
• Rotterdam Travel Guide
Our family activity on day three is the model railway at Miniworld Rotterdam, a huge warehouse where real scenes from Rotterdam have been lovingly recreated, and my three boys press the railway buttons like domineering signalmen. The space also doubles as a place for neurodiverse children to build models in a calm team environment and for traumatised train drivers to reacquaint themselves with the tracks (from £12, miniworldrotterdam.com).
Rotterdam’s Markthal has over 80 food stalls and is perfect for a budget lunch (£47 for a family of five).
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At the heart of Miniworld is Rotterdam’s yellow cube house, Kijk-Kubus. It’s actually across from the Markthal, a huge curved-roofed building that houses 80 food stalls, including Uncle Wang’s Dumplings and the Duck Truck. We went straight there for lunch, and as a treat, let the kids order whatever they wanted from the touch screen. They clicked on a Dragon’s Breath ball from a kiosk called Dulce, a flavored crispy cornball dipped in liquid nitrogen that emits a smoky sound from your mouth and nose when you bite into it. It’s not good for your health, but it tastes amazing.
On the fourth day, the twins used the Interrail app to plan their next journey, which took them three hours from the flat canals of the Netherlands to the operatic forests of the German Rhineland. They passed the time playing Hangman on notepads; one of the twins’ phrases was “I Heart Trains,” a phrase the 6-year-old accidentally failed to print in the family newspaper.
Cologne’s A&O Hostel is the best so far (and a bargain at £77 for all of us). The hostel is located in a former security office on fashionable Neumarkt, so the kids can immerse themselves in a city of tattoos, rollerblading grannies and daytime discos.
Cologne’s A&O hostel has lots of free games in the lobby (family rooms from £77)
The hostel lobby is huge, kids are having fun playing football and on the pool table, and we order a bottle of Sekt (Germany’s version of Prosecco) for £15. The six-person bedroom has an industrial chic feel, with factory-made light fixtures and metal bunk beds, but the hostel’s real draw is the laundry room; I wish the all-inclusive I stayed at last summer had a washing machine.
A treat in Cologne is the Lindt Chocolate Museum, set on an island in the Rhine. Exhibits tell the story of how Mayan and Aztec cocoa ceremonies spread to the tropics on Spanish ships and became a global commodity. Historic animal moulds include the Lindt chocolate camel made for the Arabian market; you’d think a brave man would buy his wife a giant chocolate pig (family tickets from £34, schokoladenmuseum.de).
Dinner is at Peter’s Bräuhaus, a Cologne stalwart with a giant mural of the city’s sausage-eating Illuminati, and a menu that would turn off vegetarians. We order steak tartare with a single healthy caper and a “slaughter plate” of smoked pork, blood sausage and sauerkraut, while waiters wheel trays of Kölsch, a local craft beer, in 200ml tubes around the crowded brewery. It’s etiquette to replace empty beer glasses without asking; placing a coaster on the glass means to stop (mains from £12; peters-brauhaus.de).
Lindt Chocolate Museum in Cologne (great value with a family ticket – £34 all in all)
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On day five, we board Germany’s fastest train to the spa town of Aachen, near the Dutch-Belgian border. The ICE train hurtles at 186 miles per hour through the green splendor of the German countryside. We’re in a Psst-quiet carriage, so the kids put their tablets on silent and my wife and I sip Erdinger Weissbier from distinctive bulbous glasses. European trains are far more civilised than British ones.
We arrived here 30 minutes after leaving Cologne, and two minutes later we were checked into our final hostel of the trip, the A&O hostel, housed in a former municipal health centre (family rooms from £55). In our top-floor family room, we sat the kids on a huge granite windowsill, wolfed down £5 currywurst and fries we’d brought from downstairs, and watched the trains go by. Not five-star, to be sure, but a treasured memory for us nonetheless.
• A fashion editor explains Germany’s cutting-edge spa, Lanserhof
Aachen is where British-German journalist Paul Reuter founded his news agency, and the city’s most enlightening place is the world’s only International Newspaper Museum. One of the exhibits profiles journalists such as The Times’s William Russell Howard, the first true war correspondent, and explains how he was blacklisted by commanders in the Crimean War for telling readers the realities of war, rallying Florence Nightingale to the cause. The museum’s archive of international newspaper front pages also includes the 2010 edition of The Sun, in which Germany beat England 4-1 (£5, izm.de).
But the real Aachen gem is Carolus Thermen, whose high prices make this a solo experience – imagine the more advanced Centre Parcs, with healing waters, hammam, meditation area and outdoor bubble bath (from £29, carolus-thermen.de).
The Sauna World section of the thermal spa is naturist, which might surprise many Brits, but it’s a carefree lifestyle that I love and have written about before. The various log cabins have fireplaces, foot baths and steam ceremonies like honey rubs and fruit infusions, all surrounded by an outdoor paradise of bubbling fountains, lily ponds and thermal pools. I’m Adam in German paradise.
Tristan Rutherford and his family travelled from Cologne to Aachen (pictured) using an Interrail pass, which also allowed children under 11 to travel for free.
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I arrange to meet my family at Aachen’s 14th century town hall (where I can ask them the only German phrase I learned at school: “Wo ist das Rathaus?”).
The neighbouring Postwagen handled mail for centuries, then became a wood-paneled restaurant, styled like a German aristocrat’s grandma’s attic. We ordered the speciality Himmel & Ard (heaven and earth), black pudding over apple slices and mashed potatoes, and Aachen Sauerbraten, braised brisket with sauerkraut, apples and potatoes, all extra large. It’s no wonder locals turn here for spa treatments (mains from £10, postwagen-aachen.de).
Our short trip for the new term was a four hour journey across five countries from Aachen to London on the Eurostar. Thanks to our Interrail pass, all we paid for was a seat reservation. We spent £20 on three ice creams at St Pancras. Europe was a lot cheaper.
Did I manage to stick to my £1,500 budget? Sadly not. If I’d booked the Eurostar instead of the Hull-Rotterdam ferry and avoided the expensive pancake boat in Rotterdam I probably would have managed it just fine. I’ll probably try again next year.
Tristan Rutherford was a guest of a&o hostels, Interrail, Rotterdam Tourist Information (rotterdam.info), Aachen Tourist Service (aachen-tourismus.de) and Cologne Tourist Board (cologne-tourism.com).
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