Reader, I’m broke. Three kids, one home renovation and a round of Trussonomics that ballooned our mortgage payments have made me wonder if it’s possible to have a European summer holiday budget to £1,500. That’s all in, including food, accommodation and travel from our home in Lichfield around Europe. For a week.
That’s why my family of five are tucked up in the a&o Rotterdam City hostel, which completed its own renovation earlier in June. In my youth, hostels meant snoring Aussies in dormitories. The new lobby here has table tennis, babysitting services and a bar where you can get Aperol spritzes for £4. Best of all, our en suite family room costs £77 a night (aohostels.com).
Many families pay north of £3,000 for an all-inclusive holiday in Europe, according to data from Advantage Travel Partnership. We wanted to travel more cheaply and sustainably — no flights or all-inclusive hotels — and instead use Interrail passes to explore three cities in northern Europe, visiting their museums and markets (adults from £241, under-11s travel free; interrail.eu).
The hostel brand a&o is like the Wetherspoons of discount sleeps: it converts sturdy old buildings (a papermill in Copenhagen, a post office in Leipzig), then aspires to use 100 per cent green energy to power them. The German group aims to be Europe’s first net-zero accommodation chain by 2025. Most importantly its hostels are cheap, chic and close to central train stations.
Our no-fly European break starts on the P&O Hull-Rotterdam ferry, where our eight-year-old twins rock the arcade, hit the cinema and fall asleep in front of an acoustic band. The next morning the six-year-old wakes up to see dystopian wind farms off the Dutch coast out of the window (from £118; poferries.com).
The next day we continue the maritime vibe by booking a harbour tour on Rotterdam’s Pancake Boat (from £21; pannenkoekenboot.nl). It’s a bonkers Dutch combination of boat ride and all-you-can-eat pancake counter, with a ball pit on the lower deck. Somehow it works. Parents get to enjoy cruising Europe’s biggest port, while kids gorge themselves senseless then lob plastic balls at each other. We can learn a lot about childcare from the Dutch.
On our third morning we try the hostel’s all-you-can-eat breakfast (there’s a theme here). The majority of breakfast guests are Gen-Z backpackers, meeting new pals and discussing their adventures. There might not be smoked salmon and champagne, but there is an automatic pancake machine, and my kids make monstrous Scooby Snack pancake towers, layering cheese, honey, lettuce and chocolate spread. I surreptitiously make salami sandwiches for lunch.
Children under seven stay free, breakfast included, at a&o’s 38 hostels across Europe, and families make up about 15 per cent of guests. Most of its hostels offer kids’ corners featuring board games, books, toys and interactive screens. Another benefit is that larger families with up to four children can squeeze into one family room.
Day three’s family activity is Miniworld Rotterdam’s model railway. It’s a gigantic warehouse where real Rotterdam scenes have been lovingly re-created. Our three boys push railway buttons like despotic signalmen. The space also serves as a place for neurodiverse children to construct models in a calm team environment, and for traumatised train drivers to reacquaint themselves with the tracks (from £12; miniworldrotterdam.com).
At the centre of Miniworld sits Kijk-Kubus, Rotterdam’s yellow cube houses. In real life, they are opposite the Markthal, a gigantic curved-roofed building that hosts 80 street-food kiosks, including Uncle Wang’s Dumplings and the Duck Truck. We make a beeline there for lunch, and as a treat we let the kids order anything they want from the touchscreens. They click Dragon’s Breath balls from a kiosk called the Dulce. These are flavoured crispy corn balls dipped in liquid nitrogen, which emit a smoky hiss from the mouth and nose when chewed. An unhealthy hit — but they taste great.
On day four the twins use our Interrail app to navigate our next journey. Over three hours we swap the Netherland’s pancake-flat canals for the operatic forests of Germany’s Rhineland. We pass the time by playing hangman on a notepad. One twin’s phrase is “I Heart Trains”. Our six-year-old’s is inadvertently not printable in a family newspaper.
The a&o hostel in Cologne is the coolest yet (and, again, a bargain at £77 for all of us). It’s in a former security services bureau in hip Neumarkt, where the kids are immersed in a neighbourhood of tattoos, rollerblading grannies and daytime discos.
The hostel’s lobby is vast: the kids go bananas on the football and pool tables. We order a bottle of sekt (the German version of prosecco) for £15. Our six-person bedroom is industrial chic with factory light fittings and metal bunks — but the hostel’s best addition is the laundry room. If only the all-inclusive we stayed at last summer had a washing machine.
Our Cologne treat is the Lindt Chocolate Museum on an island in the Rhine. Exhibitions tell us how the Mayan and Aztec ceremony of cocoa spread across the tropics via Spanish ships to become a global commodity. Historic animal moulds include a Lindt chocolate camel made for the Arabian market — and I can’t help think it’s a brave man who buys his wife a giant chocolate pig (family tickets from £34; schokoladenmuseum.de).
Dinner is at the Cologne institution Peters Brauhaus, which has a vast mural of sausage-eating city illuminati. The menu here would make a vegetarian wilt: we order steak tartare topped with a single healthy caper, plus the “slaughter plate” of smoked pork, blood sausage and sauerkraut, while waiters circle the packed brewhouse carrying trays of the local beer Kölsch in skinny 200ml measures. The etiquette is for empty beer glasses to be replaced without question; a coaster on top of your glass means halt (mains from £12; peters-brauhaus.de).
On day five we ride Germany’s fastest train to Aachen, a spa city near the Dutch and Belgian borders. The ICE train screams through a green sheen of German countryside at 186mph. We’re in the Psst quiet carriage, so the kids turn their tablets to silent while my wife and I sip Erdinger Weissbier from its distinctive bulbous glasses. European trains are far more civilised than their British counterparts.
Thirty minutes after leaving Cologne we’re here, and two minutes later we’re checked into our last a&o hostel of the trip, in the former municipal health office (family rooms from £55). In our top-floor family room I perch each child on a large granite windowsill while they demolish a £5 currywurst and fries from downstairs and gaze at passing trains. Granted, it’s hardly five-star; but still a priceless memory for us.
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Aachen was where the Anglo-German newsman Paul Reuter founded his news agency. The city’s most edifying sight is the world’s only International Newspaper Museum. One exhibit showcases journalists such as William Russell Howard from The Times, the first true war correspondent, explaining how he was blacklisted by Crimean War commanders as he dispatched the realities of conflict to readers, in turn rallying Florence Nightingale to the cause. The museum’s archives of international front pages include a 2010 edition of The Sun, when Germany thrashed England 4-1 (£5; izm.de).
But the quintessential Aachen experience is Carolus Thermen. The high price means this thermal spa complex is a solo experience. Imagine a next-level Center Parcs where healing waters include hammams, meditation areas and outdoor bubble baths (from £29; carolus-thermen.de).
The thermal spa’s Sauna World section is naturist, which might shock many Brits — but it’s a carefree lifestyle I love and have written about before. Various log cabins host fireplaces, footbaths and steam ceremonies including honey rubbing and fruit infusion, and it’s all surrounded by an outdoor elysium of bubbling fountains, lily-pad lakes and thermal swimming pools. I am Adam in a Germanic Eden.
I’ve arranged to meet my family at Aachen’s 14th-century city hall (which allows me to ask “Wo ist das Rathaus?”, the only German phrase I remember from school).
For centuries the adjacent Postwagen processed mail. It then became a wood-panelled restaurant, styled like an aristocratic German granny’s attic. We go super-size with an order of special Himmel & Ääd (Heaven and Earth), with black pudding on apple slices and mashed potatoes; and Aachen Sauerbraten, a braised brisket with more sauerkraut, apple and potatoes. No wonder locals need a thermal cure (mains from £10; postwagen-aachen.de).
Our sprint home for the new school term is a four-hour glide across five countries from Aachen to London via the Eurostar, where we only have to pay for seat reservations thanks to our Interrail pass. We immediately spend £20 on three ice creams at St Pancras. Europe was so much cheaper.
Did we manage to stick to our £1,500 budget? Not quite. If we’d booked the Eurostar instead of the Hull-Rotterdam ferry and skipped the pricey pancake boat in Rotterdam, perhaps we would have squeaked it. There’s always next year.
Tristan Rutherford was a guest of a&o Hostels, Interrail, Rotterdam Tourist Information (rotterdam.info), Aachen Tourist Service (aachen-tourismus.de) and Cologne Tourist Board (cologne-tourism.com)
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