Motorhome Costs – Sicily
We keep a track of what of costs as we travel around Europe in our motorhome. Below is a breakdown of what we spent while travelling around Sicily, so you have an idea how much it will cost to travel there yourself.
Sicily
| Travel | Cost | |
| Ferry | 95.00 € | |
| Tolls | 5.20 € | |
| Fuel* | 127.00 € | |
| Daytime parking | 0.00 € | |
| Train/bus/tram (all dog friendly) | 11.80 € | |
| Camping | Nights | |
| Wild Camping | 27 | 0.00 € |
| Free Aires | 0 | 0.00 € |
| Paid for Aires | 4 | 59.00 € |
| ACSI campsites | 0 | 0.00 € |
| Camping Cheque Site | 0 | 0.00 € |
| Campsites other | 8 | 54.00 € |
| Other | 0 | 0.00 € |
| Subsistence | ||
| Food (ie Supermarket) | 615.18 € | |
| Food (ie eating and drinking out) | 107.40 € | |
| LPG | 67.85 € | |
| Repairs | 25.00 € | |
| Laundry (and replacement clothes) | 35.00 € | |
| Contact with home (internet, phones, post) | 161.68 € | |
| Tours/Entrance fees | 125.50 € | |
| Supplies (non motoring items for Dave) | 29.50 € | |
| Souviners | 0.00 € | |
| Summary | ||
| Total cost | 1592.01 € | |
| Days away | 39 | |
| Cost per day | 40.82 € | |
| Cost per day (minus repairs) | 40.18 € | |
| Total Mileage (@ approx 29mpg) | 1726 | |
| Average miles per day | 44 |
Comments
The ferry over to Sicily from the ‘toe’ of Italy’s boot was quite expensive considering you can clearly see the other side. We opted for an open three month return and the price was for a motorhome no matter what size.
Diesel was slightly more on Sicily than the mainland and we paid around €1.68 – €1.78, but you could pay a lot more if you didn’t chose the self service pumps. Prices also changed throughout the day and week, weekends seeming to be the cheapest. LPG was widely available costing just over €0.85 (or over €0.90 on the motorway) a litre, which once again was slightly more than on the mainland.
Sosta’s (Italian Aires) were limited, we only stopped in one which was in Palermo as we prepared to travel to Tunisia. At €18 a night it was more expensive than most campsites (the one we stopped in over Christmas was €6) but it was a handy location for sight seeing. Otherwise we free camped all the time mainly by beaches or on car parks – we weren’t the only ones either! Some towns even provided a few services such as water or loos.
We did all our laundry when we were on the campsite over Christmas (it was €3 a load and we dried it in the sun) as we struggled to find a laundrette on the island. When we left for Tunisia we’d lugged our dirty smalls around several places close to the sosta without any luck. Returning from Tunisia though we did find a brilliant laundrette in the middle of Palermo where we got everything done.
We found eating out fairly expensive so we mainly ate our main meal in the van and had snacks (pizza or a panini) and ice cream when we were out. The few times we did eat out the food was good, if not great. We mainly shopped at Lidl, but they don’t take either visa or mastercard so we always had to ensure we had enough cash on hand to pay for our trolly full. Our supermarket costs for Sicily are a bit inflated as we did a massive shop before we went to Tunisia and again when we returned as the cupboards were bare (apart from cous cous!)
We had a nightmare with internet connection in Sicily, having bought a 3G SIM from 3 only to have it stop working after two days because they didn’t tell us we needed to wait for an SMS before connecting to the internet on the third day – random! Instead we used our EuropaSIM, only to find we were being double charged for that because we had a setting wrong on our phone so it was costing us €6 a day – still it’s good to keep in touch.
Cheers folks that is great info
We hope to go in 2018 your blog has been very
useful
Good luck and clear roads
Bill
Hi Bill, Don’t know if you will get this as a year or two since your post but, here’s hoping. We are planning a trip around Europe and want to get from Albania to Italy [looks straight forward] the Italy to Sicily with the motor home , then on to Sardinia. Having a big problem finding a vehicle ferry for the motor home to go from Reggio di Calabria to Messina. Is this the route you took? Any help gratefully received. Regards, Tony.
I found your posting while researching traveling in our Renault Master Conversion Motor Home, from Somerset to Nr Messina in Sicily.
We fly regularly to Catania from Gatwick and family pick us up from the airport.
Having now retired, we have the time and hope to make the trip in September 2018, this info is very helpful, thank you.
I will keep you posted on our plans.
Happy travels!
Jan.