Cheapest city breaks

[Lollypop0101]

Surprising boyfriend for 30th in July (bloody school holidays birthday) and want to book a city break but not sure where!

Been to krakow years ago which I loved (he hasn’t been) and was thinking maybe the below:

warsaw (worried it’s not a nice looking place)
budapest (flights are expensive and hotels don’t seem that cheap)
madrid
bratislava

He’s already been to Prague so don’t want to go to there and the prices of Amsterdam are horrendous! Just seeing whether people know of some hidden gems 🤗

If you liked Krakow then another lovely city in Poland is Gdansk. Wroclaw also. There are other smaller places such as Poznan, Bydgoszcz, Torun, Szczecin - all nice too. Outside of Poland - Porto, Athens, Istanbul, Riga, Vilnius, Tallin - all fairly reasonably priced.

@emmathedilemma
Aur fares are not £300 to get to Dublin or Edinburgh . We’ve just been from London for £50 return on the train. Ryanair is still cheap. The hotels might not be so cheap but saving on the transport really helps. They have budget hotels too. Cheap doesn’t have to mean Eastern Europe with higher air fares.

@TizerorFizz i meant the hotels and everything when you get there. Although I’ve rarely ever found travel to/from Edinburgh to be cheap.

I'd start with flights. You know your dates so start with skyscanner and type 'anywhere'. This will bring up cheapest flights. Lisbon, Berlin, Dubrovnik, all. Mostly starts with cheap Spain and Italy. I saw flights to many major Italian cities for £39 return last summer, including Milan and Rome £24. You can then book a flight using a different website, having decided where you fancy. And book a cheap hotel or air b'n'b. We've been to 12 European cities cheaply.

@emmathedilemma
We got Edinburgh at £50 return a few weeks ago. We have a rail card but even without, it’s cheaper than £300 op
quoted for flying somewhere. Plenty of things are free in Edinburgh and you can rent a flat if you don’t want to eat out. So you can keep costs down if you travel off peak and are savvy with accommodation.

Try the app called Lucky Trip. Put your dates and budget in and it comes up with flights, accommodation and an activity to do for under your budget. It's a really underrated app imo.

Will flights be cheap at the end of July?

yes but she wants a weekend in school holidays, not everyone has the luxury of off-peak travel or already owning a railcard 🙄

Gdansk is lovely as others have said. Utrecht is very pretty and interesting and a lot cheaper than Amsterdam! Porto is lovely. Berlin loads of fun and full of history. I also loved Valletta in Malta but the flights might be a bit too expensive depending on time of year.

We're going to Belfast over Easter (which I'm really excited about as have never been to NI!).

Off peak is usually weekend anyway!

Also travelling to Europe won’t be cheap in July either. As the op found out.

Ljubljana - great base for the rest of Slovenia as well.
Plovdiv- could twin centre with Sofia depending on how long you are going for.