Cook for yourself

Be your own chef and you can save money and add an extra cultural experience to your trip

While you should eat out in the local restaurants as often as possible (I've met some lasting friends over European lunches and dinner), sometimes you need to trim your sails and trim the budget.

This is an especially useful hint for families.

Try to find a cheap hotel that rents rooms (usually, luckily, the family suites) that come with a kitchenette. Plan to cook a few dinners "at home," or, if its convenient, return to the room to have lunch and take a short siesta afterwards to recharge your batteries and regroup your energies before flinging yourself back into the sightseeing grind. 

Hey, it's still a cultural experience just visiting the grocery store and discovering you have to weigh your own fruit and then type in the code for "banana" (helpfully, usually it's all done with pictograms) whereupon the scale prints out a price label; or learning that pear nectar is more popular than apple juice.

Plus you get a chance to pop into all those great little bakeries, fruit stands, wine shops, tiny grocers, butchers, delis, and cheese mongers to stock your panty.