Honeymooning on a Budget

Brian and I spent a week in Reykjavik, Iceland for our honeymoon, and I feel like we planned the perfect honeymoon for people on a budget. We got to experience another culture without breaking the bank, and it's definitely a trip we'll remember for a long time. Here are some ways we planned our budget honeymoon.

1. Picking the right location -- I saw a Pinterest post that had a list of 10 best (most unexpected) honeymoon locations. After looking through the list, we narrowed it down to Croatia, Belize, and Iceland. We looked up plane tickets to all three locations, and tickets to Iceland were less than $600 each (where the other 2 locations were around $1300 each). And so we decided to go to Iceland!

2. Finding the hotel -- We read that the food in Iceland was expensive, so there were two important things to look for when searching for our hotel. 1) Free continental breakfast, and 2) Proximity to a supermarket. This way, we could fill up on some free breakfast in the morning, and get lunch from the supermarket (see #3 eating smart). In addition to these two criteria, it was also important to find a hotel that was in (or close to) the city center, so we didn't have to pay for a cab or bus. We found Hotel Leifur Eiriksson, which fell into all our categories; it ended up only being around $550 for our stay (Monday through Saturday).

3. Eating smart -- Like I said, we were prepared to spend a lot of money on food during our trip. It turned out that we only spent about $30-40 per day for both of us! We had a few strategies when it came to food. The first was that we found a hotel with breakfast. Second, we took advantage of the supermarket across the street from our hotel. On the first day, we bought a loaf of bread and peanut butter. When we needed a snack, we had a peanut butter sandwich, and we even packed sandwiches for the lunches on the days we did tours. Most days for lunch, we went to the supermarket and bought a small pack of lunch meat for $3. (Our hotel did not have a refrigerator, so we only bought small packs that had enough for 2 sandwiches.) This was much cheaper than buying 2 meals a day, and it was also an interesting experience -- everything in the supermarket was in Icelandic! Finally, before we went to Iceland, I found several restaurants on Trip Advisor that had good reviews, were close to our hotel, and were listed as cheap for us to eat dinner.

4. Taking day tours -- In our situation, it was cheaper for us to buy two tickets for the tours we wanted to do instead of renting a car. Since there was only two of us, it would've been more expensive to rent a car for a few days than it was to go on tours. All our tours were with Sterna (all of the tour companies were very close in price, and all had the same selection of tours). We went on the Golden Circle day tour, the Northern Lights tour, and the Blue Lagoon + Southern Peninsula tour (all were awesome and worth every penny). In some cases though, if you're traveling with several people it would be more beneficial to rent a car.

5. Prioritizing -- Decide what tours, museums, and places you want to see the most. We didn't need to pay $10/person for several different museums, so we picked the ones we would be disappointed if we left without seeing. One thing we really wanted to see was the Blue Lagoon -- this was definitely a splurge, so we combined it with one of the tours we wanted to do: the southern peninsula tour. This saved us from having to purchase bus tickets to the Lagoon.

Interested in planning a trip to Iceland?

Check out my Iceland-specific tips here.