How Much Did Our South of France Holiday Actually Cost?

Part Four of our South of France Series: The Final Figure

If you’ve been following our South of France series, you’ll know we’ve already chatted about whether Nice is worth visiting, how expensive it is and how many days you actually need to spend there.

In Part One, I shared why Nice was pretty much what I expected it to be, and why that turned out to be a good thing. If you haven’t read Is Nice, France Worth Visiting? It Was Exactly What I Expected, and That’s Why I Fell in Love With It, you can start there.

In Part Two, we got into the costs of visiting Nice, from meals and beach clubs to transport and those little expenses that have a habit of adding up. You can read Is Nice, France Expensive? How We Decided What Was Worth Paying For for the details.

And in Part Three, I explained why we abandoned half our carefully planned Côte d’Azur itinerary and stopped trying to squeeze nine towns into one holiday. Turns out, having a long list of places to visit and actually wanting to visit them all once you’re there are two very different things. Read Part Three: How Many Days Do You Really Need in Nice? Why We Abandoned Half Our Côte d’Azur Itinerary.

But perhaps you’ve made it all the way through this series waiting for one thing: the actual total. How much did we spend on our South of France holiday?

Well, promise kept. This is the final figure, what it covered and what we’d do differently next time.

So, How Much Did We Spend in the South of France?

Our total came to €2,400 for two people, covering accommodation, food, sightseeing and shopping. Flights from South Africa are excluded from this amount.

We weren’t travelling on a shoestring budget, but we weren’t splashing out on luxury experiences every day either, or at all really. We wanted a comfortable place to stay, meals out, a bit of shopping and a few beach days where we could rent a sun lounger and pretend we’re D-list celebrities for an afternoon. hehe

Which, as it turns out, is a perfectly good way to spend a holiday!

We stayed in an aparthotel, which gave us the option of preparing some of our own meals rather than eating out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We still went to restaurants, enjoyed our beach days and did a fair amount of wandering around, but having a kitchen meant we had a little more control over our spending.

Our biggest lesson wasn’t that the South of France is impossibly expensive. It was that the little expenses can add up quickly, particularly when you’re paying in euros and mentally converting everything back into rands.

A meal here, a train ticket there, a gelato in-between, a beach lounger at a beach club, a towel rental and the occasional shopping purchase might not seem like much on its own. Add everything together at the end of the trip and the numbers start looking rather different.

What Was Worth Spending Money On?

We didn’t regret spending money on the things that made the holiday enjoyable. The beach clubs were a highlight, even if the cost of renting a lounger and then paying extra for an umbrella felt a little excessive. There is something lovely about spending an afternoon by the Mediterranean without having to worry about who’s going to look after your bags.

Our days at Ruhl Plage in Nice and L’Effet Mer in Antibes were part of the experience we wanted, so those costs were worth it to us.

The public beach in Monaco was a different story. We arrived without towels, decided we weren’t paying €15 for them, and made ourselves comfortable on the pebbles instead. Then it started raining, and we ended up taking the train back while wet. It wasn’t exactly our most glamorous Mediterranean moment, but it is one of the things we still laugh about.

Would paying for towels have made sense in hindsight? Probably. Did we learn to check the beach arrangements before leaving our accommodation? Also yes.

Food was another area where our expectations and the reality didn’t always line up. We generally spent around €40 to €70 for two people at ordinary restaurants, and while we enjoyed eating out, the meals weren’t always the highlight we’d imagined. There were good meals, perfectly decent meals and a few that left us wondering what all the fuss was about.

Sometimes a restaurant is popular because it photographs well. Sometimes a simple meal near where you’re staying is exactly what you actually need.

And then there was the shopping. Nice has some lovely leather goods shops, and I still think about the truffle salt I didn’t buy. Of all the things I could have brought home, that is the one I seem to have developed a strange attachment to. Apparently, you can make the most incredible memories on a holiday and still come home thinking about the one thing you left behind. Why are we humans like this???

Where Could We Have Saved Money?

Our transport pass is probably the clearest example.

We bought the Pass SudAzur Zou because our original itinerary involved visiting several towns along the coast. On paper, it made sense. We were going to be moving around constantly, so buying a pass seemed like the sensible option.

Except we didn’t follow the itinerary.

We ended up taking two day trips and attempting a third, rather than visiting all the towns we’d planned. Once we changed our minds, the pass wasn’t nearly as good value for us as we’d expected. Buying individual train tickets would likely have worked out cheaper for the trips we actually took.

That doesn’t mean the pass is a bad idea. Had we followed our original plan, it might have been worth it. The problem was that we bought it based on the holiday we thought we were going to have, rather than leaving room for the possibility that we’d change our minds.

If you’re considering the pass for your own trip, check the official Pass Sud Azur Explore information from ZOU for the current options and prices, then compare those with the journeys you actually intend to take.

We also could have cut costs by eating out less, skipping the beach clubs or buying fewer things. But those weren’t necessarily expenses we wanted to eliminate. We wanted to enjoy the holiday, not spend the entire time looking for ways to make it cheaper.

For us, the better approach would have been to leave a little more flexibility in the budget, research the transport options against a realistic itinerary and accept that we didn’t need to do everything.

There is a difference between spending money carelessly and spending it on something you genuinely want to experience. We didn’t get every decision right, but we also didn’t want to come home feeling as though we’d spent the entire holiday saying no to things.

Would We Spend €2,400 Again?

Happily!

This was our first trip to the South of France, and naturally, we chose Nice as our base. After doing plenty of research, we settled on a budget, gave ourselves a little breathing room (not enough seemingly) and set off hoping we’d get to experience everything we’d planned.

We had an incredible holiday, and we stuck to our budget. Throughout this series, I’ve shared the details of what we spent and how we approached the trip, including a few decisions that didn’t quite work out as planned.

So, would we spend €2,400 again? Yes, absolutely. Now that we’ve been to the South of France, we have a much better idea of what to expect. We know which experiences we’d happily spend a little more on, and where we could be more mindful of our spending. For our next visit, I’d probably give ourselves a more generous budget. Not because we felt we missed out this time, but because we now have a better idea of the kind of holiday we’d like to have.

There’s also something I feel quite strongly about when it comes to spending money on travel. I genuinely believe that travelling betters our lives (personal opinion). The money we spend on experiencing the world is not money I consider wasted. For me, it comes down to whether I feel we got something worthwhile out of the experience and whether it added value to our lives.

Of course, that’s going to mean something different to everyone. We all have our own priorities and ideas of what makes money well spent. For us, €2,400 was money well spent. We had a wonderful holiday, and I’d happily do it all over again!

Should You Add the Côte d’Azur to Your Travel Bucket List?

If anyone asked me whether the Côte d’Azur in the South of France deserves a spot on their travel bucket list, my answer would be an absolutely, yes!

How many days should you spend there? How much should you budget for? Which towns should you visit? And is Nice really as beautiful as everyone makes it out to be?

We’ve spent this series sharing what we thought, what we spent and what we’d do differently next time. Not a perfect itinerary or a list of places you must see, but our actual experience of a holiday that we thoroughly enjoyed, even when things didn’t go according to plan.

We didn’t see everything. We didn’t love absolutely everything. We changed our plans, made a few questionable decisions and came home with a much better idea of the kind of holiday we’d want to have next time.

And we’d go back in a heartbeat.

So, if you’re planning a trip to the South of France, have a read through the rest of our series. We’ve covered what we thought of Nice, whether it was expensive, how many days we think you need and why we eventually abandoned half our Côte d’Azur itinerary.

Take what you need, make your own plans and leave a little room for the unexpected. Just please pack the aqua shoes. Your feet will thank you.

And if you make it to the Côte d’Azur, I’d love to know what you think. You might agree with us, or you might come home wondering why we didn’t spend more time in a town you absolutely loved. That’s part of the fun of travelling. We can visit the same places and come home with completely different stories.

With love,

Keep #roamingwiththekolbes

How Much Did Our South of France Holiday Actually Cost?