Tips for cutting hotel costs

Shared baths, skipped breakfast, overnight trains, cold hard cash. You don't have to live in youth hostels and campgrounds (unless, of course you want to) to spend, easily, less than $30 per person per night on accommodations in Europe.

I'm already assuming that you're looking only at hotels rated three-star/moderate and below. These tips will help you whittle the rates down a good 10 to 40 percent below the asking price.

Before we begin, something that is not so much a tip as a point to remember: by and large, in the U.S. you're charged by the room.

In Europe you're charged by the head count.

This is why, as a frugal Assistant Scoutmaster who doesn't believe tent camping was invented with cold rainy nights in mind, I can take a group of Boy Scouts and cram 16 of them into one cheap motel room for $39.95 in the USA. But when I took them to Europe in the summer of 2000, I had to pay for lodgings on a per-scout basis (though I did usually get a "bulk discount").

What I mean is, while a four-bedded "quad" room will be cheaper than renting two double rooms, you are not going to convince the hotelier to charge even less for your willingness to squeeze four people into one double room. It just doesn't work that way over there.

Learn to Share

Cardinal law of European hotel rooms: you pay more to have a private bath in the room. If you don't mind sharing the common bathroom down the hall, you can easily save 25%–50%. Just like that. Just for being willing to carry your bathroom gear down the corridor, and for occasionally have to wait a bit for someone else to vacate the facilities.

In most places (aside from hostels), you usually share the hall bath with, at most, four or five other rooms, more often two or three. Frequently you get it all to yourself; there was just no space to install a bathroom in your bedroom, so you have to use a private one out in the corridor.

What's more, in the vast majority of hotels even the bathless rooms come equipped with at least a sink, they just lack the shower/tub or a toilet (and some even have the shower as well, just not the commode). That means for simple ablutions and the hand-washing of your clothes you're still all set. And don't worry, you can still hear nature calling from just down the hall.

Avoid Breakfast

I don't mean don't eat it, just don't eat it at your hotel. If you have the option of opting out of breakfast and getting something knocked off your hotel bill, do so. Usually hotel a breakfast costs anywhere from $5 to $15 per person, and—except in British and Irish B&Bs, some farm stays, or a Scandinavian smorgasbord—normally consists of croissants and/or rolls, maybe some packaged jams, coffee or tea, and some sort of weird European orange drink that tastes likes an early, and thankfully discarded, formula for Tang; it's wet, sweet, and vaguely orangey, but it certainly ain't juice.

Hotel breakfasts aren't the only rip-offs at the inn. Here's the skinny on some perfectly legal hotel scams:
The minibar
The telephone
The parking garage
The breakfast
The laundry service
The taxes

Heck, you can get the same "hotel breakfast" (minus the definitely-not-Tang) from the corner cafe for $3 or less. Plus, if you patronize the local bar, you get the chance to rub elbows at the bar with locals on their way to work rather than share a hotel breakfast in a room filled with other tourists. Only on very rare occasions and in the very cheapest hotels do they charge you as little for breakfast as the local cafe would.

Even if the hotel lays on a larger spread-slices of ham, cheese, teensy boxes of cold cereal-it's not truly worth the added expense. I do, of course, make exception for the occasional full fry-up in Britain or Ireland, those hearty farm breakfasts, and the Swedish smorgasbord. Not for every morning, mind you (your cholesterol count probably couldn't take it), but on occasion.

If, however, your hotel insists that breakfast is included in the rate and you cannot opt out, then you have carte blanche to bring your daypack down to breakfast with you and load it up with enough extra food to make at least a decent mid-morning snack if not a light picnic lunch out of it. After all, the hotel did insist, and you are paying through the nose for it.

Rock Yourself to Sleep on an Overnight Train for $0 to $30

OK, first the $30 version. If you've got to traverse vast distances on your trip—train rides of more than six or seven hours—you can either (1) waste basically an entire day of your vacation getting from point a to point b, or (2) book a sleeping berth (couchette) for $20 to $30 on an overnight train, sleep while you travel, and end up both paying far less for accommodations that night than you would at a hotel and getting where you're going without blowing off a whole day.

Sure, you miss out on the pretty scenery, plus truth be told train bunks provide far from a comfortable and sound night's sleep, but all in all it's not a bad deal. Always book a second class couchette, which will usually land you one of six narrow bunks in a tiny compartment, because you really aren't going to get much more out of the pricier options anyway.

Now, about that $0 option. This one is getting harder and harder to finagle. I blame "progress." Old style European trains were done up with an all-compartment configuration, each car made up of ten or so small rooms, each with its own sliding door and picture window. Each seats six people each in two facing rows, all connected by a corridor running along the edge of the car.

This civilized arrangement, where you often get to know the other passengers in your compartment and maybe end up sharing a picnic or at least learning something, is being slowly phased out in Western Europe in favor of the soulless, straight-through car configuration familiar to any American commuter, where two-seat-wide rows line either side of a central aisle, everyone facing the same way (or, sometimes, half the car facing forwards, the other backwards).

If you're lucky and end up on of the old-style trains, the seat bottoms in those compartments will often pull out into the middle of the room while the seatbacks collapse down. Pull out two opposing seats, and you have one continuous, padded flat surface spanning the compartment. Pull out all six seats, and you've got a romper room of sorts, a roughly kind-sized bed that take up the entire compartment.

Just slide the compartment door shut, close the shades, turn out the lights, and at least pretend to be asleep so that, hopefully, new people boarding the train will refrain from disturbing you and find some other compartment to sit in.

Of course, the danger is that they will not pass you by, the lights will flick back on, and you will spend the night sitting up and miserably wreathed in cigarette smoke while your new companions chatter to each other loudly.