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Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna

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All information in this post is accurate as of the publishing date, however it is always best to check timetables, pricing, or opening hours before visiting a destination or venue.

Vienna is a beautiful city with so much to see, do, and eat (we had schnitzel every single day). The great thing about Vienna is there are so many free or low budget activities, so you can easily fill a couple of days with low cost activities. Here are our favourites!

Krissie and Katherine smiling and standing in front of Belvedere Palace in Vienna, Austria. Behind them is a large patch of neatly mown grass and a large white palace with a green roof "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"

Explore Belvedere and Schönbrunn Palace Gardens

Cost: Free

Belvedere Schlossgarten and Schönbrunn Palace Park are two of our favourite gardens we visited in Vienna. Both gardens belong to their respective palaces, Belvedere Palace costs €16.70 and Schönbrunn Palace costs €20, but the gardens are free to enter!

Belvedere is a bit smaller, you could probably wander around it an hour or less, but Schönbrunn Palace Park has so much to offer! It has a palmhouse and zoo that both cost to enter, but also has a rose garden, fountains and the Gloriette which is a giant structure on top of a hill with wonderful views of the garden below. We wandered around this garden for an hour or two (we saw lots of squirrels and even a snake, so great if you’re an animal lover, and not someone with a snake phobia, like Katherine 😂), and we really recommend it.

A view through lots of green and yellow plants to a church with a tall black spire in Schönbrunn Palace gardens in Vienna, Austria "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Schönbrunn Palace gardens
A circular patch of green grass around a flower bed in Vienna, Austria. In the foreground is another flower bed with purple and orange flowers and in the background are green plants and Belvedere Palace "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Belvedere Palace gardens

Relax in the Beautiful Parks

Cost: Free

Vienna has so may beautiful parks that you can relax in when you need a bit of a break! Our favourites were:

  • Volksgarten, this has a rose garden in it too which is lovely to look around
  • Burggarten (this garden also has a butterfly garden in a palmhouse for €9)
  • Karlsplatz, which is just outside St. Charles’s Church (one of the most beautiful buildings)
  • Sigmund Freud Park which has the most amazing view of Votivkirche, an incredible church
  • Citypark, which is the bigger of the parks and has some lovely ponds and grounds to enjoy!
A rose garden in Volksgarten, Vienna, Austria with red and orange roses on green bushes and a big green tree behind them. Beside the roses is a green lamp post and the sky is a beautiful blue "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Volksgarten with its beautiful roses

Enjoy the Beautiful Architecture of the Streets

Cost: Free

Vienna is absolutely full of the most beautiful buildings, including St. Peter’s Catholic Church, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Hofburg Palace, St. Charles’s Church and Votivkirche. Plus all the buildings in the Museums Quartier are amazing too! You can see all of them just by wandering around the city by foot, no need to take any public transport or spend any money to see some beautiful things!

You can also enter St. Stephen’s Cathedral or St. Peter’s Catholic Church for free and admire the beautiful buildings from inside.

A giant church made of white stone with 2 large spires towering over a large green space with trees and lots of people sitting in the shade "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Votivkirche Church
Across a yellow pond is a church with 2 large round towers and a huge blue dome in the middle in Vienna, Austria "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
St Charles’ Church
Katherine standing in front of a huge golden cathedral in Vienna, Austria. The cathedral has huge arched windows, pointed parts of the roof while the main roof is tiled in blue, white and yellow tiles "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
St Stephen’s Cathedral

Naschmarkt

Cost: Free

This is a wonderful street market that runs 6am-9pm Monday-Saturday. It’s quite long and sells a variety of items including lots of dried fruit, fresh produce and souvenirs! There is some lunch and dinner style food available but not too many so don’t rely on it if you need a lot of options to choose from!

A street with market stalls on both sides in Vienna, Austria and umbrellas covering the whole walkway. Fresh food, clothes, bags and other souvenirs can be seen and there's people walking down the street looking at what's on offer "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Naschmarkt is a long walkway like this

Prater

Cost: Free or however much you want to spend on rides

Prater is a wonderful theme park in Vienna that is free to enter. You can walk around the park and see everyone riding the rides for no cost, however if you’d like to ride the rides you will have to pay small amounts per ride. If you don’t want to though, it is fun just looking at everyone and having that theme park feeling for free.

The information desk at Prater in Vienna, Austria which is a building with three red domes over the service windows and a red sign above it that says "Prater". Behind part of a ferris wheel can be seen "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Prater is a great place to walk around and go on some rides!

Try a Sachertorte

Cost: Between €4-€9 per slice

Sachertorte is a chocolate cake with an apricot jam in the middle, that originates in Austria. It is delicious and is often served with whipped cream to help with the richness of the cake. While in Vienna we tried some at Gumpendorfer Stube which was a short walk out of the main city (they also have a delicious schnitzel). Here are some other cafes we found Sachertortes for various prices available:

A blue plate with a rectangular slice of sachertorte in Vienna. Austria. The cake is a chocolate cake with a chocolate drizzle over the top with a blob of whipped cream and strawberries next to it "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Our delicious sachertorte
Two white plates with a large golden schnitzel on it with yellow potato halves, a lemon wedge and a little pot of cranberry sauce next to it in Vienna, Austria "Free and Budget Friendly Ways to Spend Your Time in Vienna"
Our schnitzel from Gumpendorfer Stube

So there are some ideas! If you do any of them, let us know what you thought and what your favourites were. And let us know if we’ve missed any. We’d love to add more to the list and learn more about this wonderful city for our next visit!

Check out everything we got up to in Vienna in our Vlog:

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Our favourite travel planning resources

Flights: Let’s start at the very beginning. When planning a trip our favourite websites to compare flights on are Google Flights and Skyscanner. We then personally prefer to go through the airlines official website to book flights.
Travel Insurance: Once you’ve booked flights, the very next step should be travel insurance. We highly recommend booking travel insurance for every international trip no matter the length, because it’s better to be safe than sorry. For our Australian readers we used Travel Insurance Saver which allowed us to book with only one way flights and were great.
Travel Items: It’s no secret that one of the best travel items is a portable charger. This INIU one has great reviews, is relatively cheap and has 3 spots for chargers so will be perfect to keep your phones alive during those long travel days! Another great item we used was a portable washing line which is perfect for when you don’t have access to a washing machine. And when you do, these laundry sheets are so easy to pack and work amazingly well.
Accommodation: For everywhere we stayed, we booked on either Airbnb or Booking.com. Both websites allow you to filter to only show you places in your budget, and pick from inclusions such as kitchen and laundry so it’s really easy to find exactly what you need!
Travel SIM: We used Airalo e-SIMs for data while overseas and loved them. You download the app, pick the plan you want and install it on your phone in less than 10 minutes. If you’re interested, use our referral code KRISTE3325 to get $3USD off your first purchase.
Tours & Activities: We booked all our day trips and some activities through GetYourGuide. There are so many things to see and do in each city and each one has a rating out of 5 and reviews to help you make your decision.

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