Kaunas Good value
Cepelinai, kibinai (the Karaim pastries), and a café scene along Laisvės alėja and in the old town; the market at the station for the produce. Cheap. A dinner is €15–25.
Budget travel in Lithuania
What a visitor's money does in Lithuania: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Mid-range average across 5 guides · 5 is very cheap
Money
Euro (EUR) · 1 EUR = 1.15 USD · 1 EUR = 0.86 GBP
Euro, cards everywhere including the buses, and the old-town exchange booths are for people who arrived with the wrong currency. Contactless is universal.
ATMs
Avoid: Euronet, the machines in the old town tourist streets
Use: Swedbank, SEB, Luminor
Cards work everywhere including the buses. The Curonian Spit has a machine in Nida and not many more; withdraw before the ferry.
Getting around
A short ride in Vilnius: €5–8 across town — middling
From the airport: From the airport to the centre €10–15, or the train for €1
Cheaper than a street taxi and quoted first.
City by city, cheapest first
Klaipėda Good value
Fish, smoked on the spit and fried in the port; the old town has the restaurants and the craft beer; the Švyturys brewery is the town’s. A dinner is €20.
Trakai Good value
Kibinai — the Karaim meat pastries — from Senoji Kibininė or any of the bakeries on the main street, eaten hot with broth. The lake fish. That is the town’s food and it is enough.
Vilnius Mid-range
Cepelinai — potato dumplings the size of a fist — cold pink beetroot soup in summer, and a restaurant scene that has arrived along Vilniaus street and in the Halės market; Lithuanian craft beer is serious. A dinner is €20–30.
Curonian Spit Mid-range
Smoked fish — bream and eel — from the smokehouses in Nida and Juodkrantė, eaten on the lagoon shore with beer. The restaurants in Nida for the rest. Everything is seasonal.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
The guides in Lithuania
VilniusLithuaniaA baroque old town on a scale no one expects, a self-declared republic of artists across the river, and a hot-air balloon over it all on a summer evening
KaunasLithuaniaThe interwar capital, a whole city of modernism between two rivers, with a castle, a funicular, a devil museum and a basketball obsession
KlaipėdaLithuaniaThe port that was Memel: a German old town of timber warehouses, the ferry to the Curonian Spit, and the country’s only sea
Curonian SpitLithuaniaA ninety-kilometre sandbar between the sea and a lagoon, with dunes the height of a cathedral, a fishing village of painted wooden houses and Thomas Mann’s summer house
TrakaiLithuaniaA red-brick castle on an island in a lake, a Karaim community that has been here six hundred years and bakes the country’s favourite pastry, and Vilnius half an hour away