Lourdes Segade/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Economic chaos and mass unemployment are bad news. But to the curious traveler, they are an opportunity for a bargain. So it’s only natural for a cost-conscious American reading headlines about economic catastrophe in Spain and Greece to wonder: Is there a cheap vacation there for me?
The answer is: not really. The reasons why underscore the difficulties the euro is creating for the continent’s hardest-hit countries. A comprehensive comparison of travel prices is difficult to undertake, of course, but thanks to the rise of soulless international hotel chains we can at least approximate the cost of staying one place rather than another. Try to book yourself into the Madrid Airport Hilton later this month, and you’ll pay a bit more than 100 euros a night. That’s a lot cheaper than the listings I saw for the De Gaulle Airport Hilton near Paris. Prices there were 50 percent higher—or even double—for some May bookings. But the Madrid price is about the same as the $130 or so that the O’Hare Airport Hilton wants here in Chicago. If you want to go to the beach, the Hilton in downtown Miami has May rooms from $159 a night, while the hotel in downtown Barcelona starts at 201 euros, which works out to just over $255. Downtown Athens is 179 euros, also more than $200 a night.
The point isn’t that Spain is an egregiously expensive place to visit. Certainly it’s cheaper than economically stronger western European tourist destinations. But given the incredible weakness of the Spanish economy, it’s hardly the bargain of a lifetime.
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