A Coke for $5.50 shows fall of dollar

The Baltimore Sun

HEIDELBERG, Germany -- A day after Michael Kingsley arrived in this romantic university town, he was in no mood to savor the cobblestone streets, the half-timbered houses or the flower-bedecked windows - to say nothing of the camera-ready castle on the hill.

Kingsley had left his camera battery and charger in a hotel room in London, and he knew that as an American tourist, buying replacements here was going to sting. The damage: $143. Back home in Falls Church, Va., he said, the same purchase would have set him back no more than $100.

For Americans visiting Europe this summer, the steep decline of the dollar against the euro and the British pound has made high prices a lamentable part of the traveler's tale. The Kingsley family's hotel room in London was $500 a night; five bite-sized chocolates at Harrods cost $10.

"It's OK," said Kingsley, 59, with a resigned laugh. "I'll just have to work a few extra years to pay off this vacation." His wife, Laura, did her best to soothe him. "It's just play money," she said.

By now, five summers after the dollar began its long swoon against the euro and the pound, American travelers are accustomed to $5 cups of coffee and triple-digit dinner checks in Europe's great capitals.

But the dollar's latest plunge has turned mere sticker shock into a form of suspended disbelief for many tourists. Yesterday the dollar fell to new lows against the euro - 72 cents - while the pound soared above $2.05 for the first time in more than a quarter of a century.

"Four-dollar Cokes; no, 4-euro Cokes," said Kaelon Kroft, a custodian from San Bernardino, Calif., when asked what sticker shocked him most in Paris. "We just paid 9.50 euros for a can of Coke at a cafe. At our hotel, the bar was serving a glass of Coke for 4 euros."

At the current exchange rate, it cost just over $5.50.

The Krofts and the Kingsleys both scaled back their European holidays to limit the pain of the currency pinch.

But neither family's members seriously thought of canceling their vacations, and their glass-is-half-full determination to make the best of things was echoed in interviews with American tourists from Ireland to Italy.

It is also reflected in the tourism statistics in France, Germany, Spain and other countries, which show that the number of Americans visiting Europe has increased this year even as the value of the dollar has eroded. Travel experts say this speaks both to the resilience and the rising affluence of American tourists, as well as to the perennial appeal of Europe as a destination.

"Americans who visit Europe tend to be more educated, with higher incomes, so they are less affected by the exchange rate," said Joachim Scholz, a researcher at the German National Tourist Board.

In the last 12 months, the dollar has declined 8.9 percent against the euro and 9.9 percent against the pound. But the erosion has sharpened over the last few weeks, after many Americans had already booked their European trips. Most appear to have held on to their bookings.

Mark Trotter, a high-school teacher from Fresno, Calif., taking 27 students on a tour of Madrid and Barcelona, said he watched with alarm as the dollar sank in the last two weeks.

"I remember doing this trip for $2,100 as recently as 2003," Trotter said, standing beneath the stone columns in Madrid's main square. "This year it cost $2,800. But in all honesty, parents don't even blink."

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