Our Guide to Luxembourg on a Budget

Research and Budgeting

We recommend researching and budgeting your holiday in advance, so you can be sure that you’ll get the most out of your trip. It’s also a great way to get some ideas about what activities you might like to do when you get there. Looking up the local food and culture is bound to get you excited about your destination! 

If research and budgeting isn’t something you enjoy, then don’t worry. Luckily for you, I really like doing the planning part of a trip and have already done most of the hard work. We’ve calculated how much our budget came to and we’ve laid out the costs of each component in detail in the sections below, so you can modify the budget to your choices. For 3 nights and 3 days in Luxembourg we spent £337 per person. 

Flights  and Carbon Offsetting £38

Accommodation £115

Transport £0

Activities £104

Food £48

Airport transfers £32

  £337

As usual, don’t forget to budget in the cost of getting to and from the airport at your departure and destination. Our airport transfers this time only included trains from our home to the airport, because public transport in Luxembourg is completely free!

To reduce this budget further, we think the best category to save money on is the activities. If you read our Things to Do page, you can see that we spent most of the money on a day trip. You could miss this out, or choose to follow our money saving alternative for the day trip and make huge savings in this area. 

Getting to Luxembourg

2. Train or Coach

Using Trainline.com, we found that the price for a train on similar off-peak dates is a whopping £400pp return from London to Luxembourg, with the trip taking 7 - 9hrs each way! 

As you might expect, the coach is much cheaper than the train, costing £99pp return on Flixbus.com. However, the travel times are much longer on the coach, taking 12.5 - 13hrs each way.

This makes flying the clear winner on this one, costing less than half of the coach option and taking less than half of the train time! However, if your attraction to public transport is due to the lower CO2 emissions, then we do recommend paying to offset your flight. Most airlines now offer this as an addition at check out, but we prefer to use Sustainable Travel (https://sustainabletravel.org/) as it is partnered with WWF. For this trip it cost us £3.79 each to carbon offset. 

Getting around in Luxembourg

1. Walking

Luxembourg city centre is relatively compact, which makes it perfect for walking between activities. This city also has the added bonus of having amazing views of the valley below if you are walking along the edge of the fortifications! 

The streets and shops in Luxembourg city are almost all modern and, as it's one of the richest countries in Europe, these were sadly all out of our price range. This meant we weren't able to try something new by just popping into somewhere that caught our eye, like we usually do. We would have spent our budget very quickly! We did still enjoy looking through the shop windows, appreciating the similarities and differences with other cities we've visited. 

2. Tram or Bus

As the public transport in the whole of Luxembourg is free, why would you not take advantage and hop on a tram or bus whenever your legs are travel weary! There is one tram line that runs through the city and extends from the financial district in the north to the train station and onwards to the Parisian styled shopping highstreet in the south of the city. With trams arriving every 5-10mins this is a super convenient way to get around the city centre without too much consideration of timings required.

There are also plenty of bus routes which make adventuring further afield completely affordable and is the perfect way to see more of this picturesque country! If you have a day spare and do want to explore outside of the city, then we recommend taking the bus out to Vianden Castle. 

Accommodation

For this trip we booked our accommodation about 6 weeks in advance. We usually recommend booking 2-3 months ahead of your trip, but we still think we found a good price, even with our slightly later booking schedule. 

As part of finding the best option, we tend to look at a few alternatives and choose based on price and proximity to our planned activities. Luxembourg has free public transport, so we were able to consider accommodation further out from the city centre without having to work out the added cost of travel each day. We decided that we would limit our daily travel time to the centre to 30 mins each way, but it’s up to you how long you’re willing to spend on public transport.

Hotel

We used several hotel comparison sites to find the best hotel/hostel options before we travelled. 

A bed in a shared dormitory in a hostel was £90pp (£30pp per night) (https://youthhostels.lu/en/youth-hostels/youth-hostel-luxembourg) and is the cheapest option if you are a single traveller. It also gives you the opportunity to meet other travellers and swap tips on activities and places to eat that you’ve discovered during your trip. 

The cheapest hotel option was a twin room at the airport. We paid £229.26 to stay at the Ibis by the airport but it’s possible to get the same room for £180 if you book about 2-3 months in advance. If you get the cheaper advance rate then this works out at the same price as the hostel per person. The main pro of a hotel is that you get your own space, a private room with an ensuite. If you're not keen on socialising in a hostel or Airbnb then a hotel will be more suitable.

Airbnb

On Airbnb for a long weekend (3 nights) we found that prices for accommodation within walking distance to the centre were typically £260-280 for a double room in a shared apartment, or £320-340 for a studio flat. This works out at about £40-60 per night per person depending on whether you want to socialise with live-in hosts or have the whole place to yourself. These prices didn't seem to vary much when we looked 2-3 months ahead, compared to just 6 weeks ahead, but there were definitely more options to choose from within these price brackets if you start looking earlier!

If you are happy to stay outside the city centre and use public transport each day, you can get the cost of a double room in a shared apartment down to about £230 for 3 nights. However, you need to factor in the time it takes to get to the centre when thinking about doing this. When we looked, the cheaper options were at least 20 mins on public transport each way. For the sake of an extra £5 per person per day, we think it’s worth staying in the centre and saving the travel time!

Things to Do in Luxembourg

For our top recommendations of things to do in Luxembourg, check out our Luxembourg Things to Do page!

Food in Luxembourg

As usual, we try to keep our food costs down by bringing plenty of it with us from the UK. This time we brought porridge oats and pasta with us to stop ourselves from eating out for every meal. We still wanted to sample the local cuisine though, and ate one meal out a day, having breakfast and the other meal at our accommodation. 

After our walking tour we got lots of yummy sounding recommendations from our local guide and were able to try a few of them during our visit.