I visited Europe’s cheapest and most expensive cities – here’s what you get for £400

I visited cheap-as-chips but fascinating Pristina – where five-star digs cost £50 a night – and uber-expensive Geneva

It’s no secret that, while people are as eager as ever to travel, budgets have rarely been tighter. With this in mind, and with the autumn short-break season upon us, I decided it would be interesting to spend a weekend in Europe’s cheapest and priciest cities (excluding places on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office no-go list, such as Minsk) – namely Pristina in Kosovo and Geneva in Switzerland – with exactly the same budget: £400. 
With that balance I had to buy flights, stay at least two nights, and also feed, water and entertain myself. It sounded like a tricky but intriguing experiment. What kind of accommodation could I afford, what might I eat, and how much fun could I have with £400?
Here’s what happened.
Costly Geneva turned out – surprisingly – to be a bargain in this regard. I got an early October return flight from Gatwick with easyJet for just £91.98 (carry-on luggage only). 
Once in Geneva I made the happy discovery that the prosperous local authorities generously hand out a free public transport ticket to visitors for the duration of their stay. This applies to all trams, buses, trains and ferries within the city’s superb public transport system. Nice.
Pristina was even cheaper: I got return Wizz Air tickets from Luton, also in early October, for just £67, though I had to add £44 for luggage (as the infrequent direct flights required three nights in the Kosovan capital).
Transport in Pristina itself comes in two forms: walking or taxi. There are buses, but they’re the wheezing type that look like they might conk out any moment.
Luckily, taxis are plentiful and cheap (but no hailing apps). I paid £2-4 for an average journey in the city, £10-15 for more adventurous jaunts beyond (see below).
For my three nights in Pristina, I was able to afford a stay in the city’s best hotel, the aptly named Hotel Pristina. It is in the city centre, with excellent views, and boasts a gym, an indoor pool and big, airy bedrooms. Just £150 for three nights in five-star digs? Sweet.
Geneva was another story. For a few days it looked like I was going to end up sleeping in a hostel dorm, thanks to my budget. Hotel rooms – with dismal ratings – were £150 a night, minimum. However, at the last moment I found an Airbnb “studio”. It turned out to be a tiny, spartan room at the top of five floors (no lift, eek), but it was clean, central-ish, and it wasn’t a dorm. £200 for two nights. 
In Pristina you’re hard pushed to spend serious money on food. I found restaurants with dishes for less than £1. The city has an extroverted hybrid of Viennese and Turkish café culture, with coffee and cake in one of its many popular cafés costing around £2-3, and vibrant nightlife. The eastern feel of Muslim-yet-secular Pristina is evident in the local cuisine. It’s great if you like kebabs.
It is also a good place to eat if you like heat: they put chillis on everything. Expect to pay £5 -20 for a meal including booze. A pizza on my second night was a dizzying £9 with some decent local red wine, but it was the trendiest pizza place in the city, and it had stacks of chillis on it.
Geneva was very different. For breakfast I went to the café next to my Airbnb, where a sandwich, pastry and coffee was £15. And this was in the cheap and student-y area of Geneva. One lunchtime I checked the price of a hamburger at a café next to the lake, and it was £24. So I skipped lunch. Dinner in a proper restaurant seemed out of the question if I wanted to stay within £400, as you can drop £50-150 on a modest solo meal. On night one I was helped by a late plane, so I didn’t have a chance to eat – I grabbed two G&Ts and some nuts instead: £25 in a local bar.
The second night, I decided to use the “kitchenette” in my Airbnb and self-cater. I’d noticed that supermarket prices were relatively reasonable. So I bought gruyère cheese, French salami, proper bread, ripe tomatoes, a nice bottle of Australian wine, and a bar of Swiss chocolate, for about £35, which felt like a total bargain, and a feast. Then I contentedly watched Slow Horses, in my attic, sipping shiraz.
Pristina is possibly the ugliest town in Europe – and I’ve been to Wick in Scotland. This is no fault of its own: Pristina is in the “shatterlands” – the notorious Balkan borderland of clashing religions and empires.
It has therefore been destroyed several times over, and communism added monstrous buildings such as the National Library, which looks like Hitler’s bunker covered with constructivist chicken wire.
It is also fascinating. Check out the last bits of the old town. Amid the chaos you can find 16th-century mosques, old hammams, buzzing markets, hideous new shacks, all devoid of tourists. It means, in a weird way, that battered “old town” Pristina sometimes feels more authentic than the best-preserved old town in Western Europe. 
Near Pristina are two stand-out destinations. First, the monument to the Field of the Blackbirds, on a hill beyond the brothels, near the US Embassy.
This commemorates an epochal battle that changed the world in 1389, but also Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s notorious 1989 speech, made right here, which started the Yugoslav wars. Powerful vibes abound. 
South of the city is the Gracanica monastery: 700 years old, Serbian-built, Unesco-listed, and quite spellbinding, like an Egyptian tomb inexplicably decorated by Gustav Klimt. Do not miss.
Pricey Geneva is… meh. It is wealthy, drab, grey and stuffed with pompous institutions (Fifa, the UN, Red Cross). By ultra-high Swiss standards it can be a touch scruffy. All in all, it is like an opulent lakeside Novosibirsk. It also has a problem with petty crime (I noticed an old woman taking hard drugs about 100 yards from the main square).
There are things to see, such as the Villa Diodati, where Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley lived on the southern lakeshore, and where Mary wrote Frankenstein. But it’s private, so you can only gawp. The echoey cathedral, in the pleasant vieille-ville, has John Calvin’s chair, which looks weirdly painful – a must-see for fans of chairs owned by dissenting religious leaders.
What truly ennobles Geneva is Cern, the particle physics lab with the Large Hadron Collider. This is a sublimely fascinating destination: there are tours of the collider itself, with virtual-reality headsets where you can basically be a Higgs boson.
There is also great interactive stuff for kids; you can see the building where they make antimatter, and it has the actual computer where Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. We should demand it back, and put it in the British Museum.
Wondrous Cern is also free, and just 20 minutes by tram from downtown.
I stayed within my £400 budget in both cities, though it was close (you could easily have a nice time in Pristina for even less). 
If you want an unusual but cheap city break, try Pristina. Moreover, the rest of this untouched country is easily accessible by cheap hire car (£22 a day).
However, if you want to visit Geneva, make it a day trip to CERN. You’re better off sleeping somewhere else, less expensive.

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