GlynThere is a moment, usually on about the third morning, when you realise you have not been in a car for two days and have not missed it once. That is half of what people who have been coming here for twenty years actually like about Benidorm, though almost nobody says it out loud. Everything is flat. Everything is close. And the bits that are not close are joined up by buses and a tram that most visitors never quite work out.
Which is a pity, because working them out is the difference between a week on one beach and a week on the whole coast.
What follows is what all of it costs. Every figure was checked against the operators’ own published tables in August 2026, and where a price is likely to move, I have said so rather than pretend otherwise.
The buses
The urban network is run by Llorente Bus, part of Avanza, and mercifully it is one flat fare across the whole thing. No zones to puzzle over on a hot pavement with a bus coming.
A single ticket from the driver is €2.00. A journey on a BUS card is €1.50. The card itself costs €2 and you top it up on board, anything from ten euros to twenty.
So the card pays for itself on the fifth journey, and if there are two of you sharing it, on the third. Given that a week in Benidorm containing fewer than four bus journeys would be a fairly sedentary week, buy the card on day one and stop thinking about it.
The part genuinely worth knowing: changing buses is free if you validate again within ninety minutes. Touch in on the second bus as well as the first. Plenty of people do not, and pay twice for one journey without ever realising.
The tourist passes are not worth it
There is a 24-hour pass at €12, a 72-hour at €24 and a seven-day at €48. They are displayed prominently, they sound convenient, and they are almost always a poor buy.
Do the arithmetic before you are tempted. At €1.50 a journey on the card, the 24-hour pass only wins if you make eight separate journeys in one day. The seven-day pass needs thirty-two journeys in a week. That is more than four a day, every day, including the day you land and the day you fly home.
Unless you are planning something very unusual indeed, you will not get near either. They are priced for people who have not sat down with a pen, and there is no shame in having been one of them.
The tram, which is the best value thing in Benidorm
The TRAM runs north towards Altea, Calp and eventually Dénia, and south down the coast into Alicante. There is a stop for Terra Mítica on the way.
Hardly anybody staying a week uses it. That is the shame of it, because for the price of a coffee it turns a Benidorm holiday into a Costa Blanca one, and the line hugs the coast for a good part of the way, so the journey is half the point.
Benidorm to Alicante is €2.80 each way, or €4.80 for a return. For that you get a whole day in a city with a castle above it, a proper marina, a covered market and streets that have nothing whatever to do with holiday resorts. If you have been coming for years and never done it, do it this time. Go early, and take the front seats if they are free.
The ticket nobody buys
If you are going to use the tram more than twice, buy the Bono 10.
Ten two-zone journeys cost €6.00. That is sixty cents a journey against €2.80 for a single. Add the €2 for the card itself and ten trips come to eight euros rather than twenty-eight.
That is not a small saving. It is the fare cut by roughly three quarters, and it takes one question at the window.
One honest caveat, and it matters more than usual here. Those tram prices are a temporary reduction that the Generalitat has extended to 31 December 2026. They are genuinely what you will pay today, but unused discounted tickets can be exchanged for standard-rate ones until March 2027, which rather tells you the full fare is expected back. Check before you plan a fortnight of day trips around it.
Taxis, and when they are actually the right answer
Benidorm council updated the taxi tariffs for 2026, the first revision in three years, so whatever you remember from a couple of summers ago is now out of date.
The daytime meter starts at €3.60 and adds €1.02 a kilometre. From nine in the evening until seven in the morning, and all day at weekends and on public holidays, it starts at €4.25 and charges €1.16 a kilometre.
In practice, a hop across the resort of about three kilometres comes to roughly €7 in the day and a little over €8 at night.
Here is the bit people get wrong, and they get it wrong in both directions. A taxi is not the extravagance it has a reputation for being. For three or four of you at eleven at night it is often cheaper than the bus and a great deal less bother. And if anybody in the party is tired, or unsteady on a kerb, or simply does not fancy standing about in the dark after a long evening, then it stops being a question of money at all. Spend the eight euros. You are on holiday.
Three surcharges worth knowing. A fifth passenger adds €3. Starting a journey at Terra Mítica or Terra Natura adds €2.23. Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve add €2.49, which matters if you are one of the many who spend Christmas out here.
One last thing, about the airport bus
This catches people out every single summer, and it is entirely avoidable.
The ALSA bus from Alicante airport does not stop once in Benidorm. It stops twice, and it is the same bus on the same ticket. It calls at the main bus station on Calle Francisco Llorca Antón after about forty-five minutes, then carries on to Avenida Europa, 8, by the Nordia centre, arriving at about fifty-five.
Most people get off at the first stop, because it is the one they have heard of. A fair few then pay six euros for a taxi back towards where the bus was already heading.
Work out which of the two is nearer your hotel before you travel. Staying in your seat for another ten minutes is free. A taxi from the wrong end of town, with the cases, in August, is not.
Where this came from
All of the above is one chapter of Benidorm on the Cheap, a guide I have spent this summer writing about what a week here actually costs and where the money quietly leaks out of it.
It is not a guidebook. You have been. You know where the beach is. It is about the big decisions, the four-figure ones, which are all made before you leave the house and most of them made badly at eleven o’clock at night by somebody who is tired and has thirty seconds to think.
Flights, and why the headline fare is never the price. Airport parking, where people overpay by the widest margin of anything in the whole trip, and where the small local airport turns out to be the dear one. Every way of getting from Alicante to your hotel, priced against each other. Board level, settled with numbers rather than opinion. The parks, gate price against online price.
Twenty-seven pages, no padding. It is £7.99 and it downloads to your phone the moment you buy it.
Every price in it was checked against the operator’s own published table this month. Where something moves about, like transfers and airport parking, I have said so rather than quote you false precision. And if you find something in it that is wrong, tell me and I will fix it that day. That has already happened twice, and both times the reader was right, and the guide is better for it.
And since people sometimes ask: what it brings in pays for the things that keep this going. The hosting, the domain, the email service that sends the Sunday newsletter out to more than seventeen hundred people. None of that is free and none of it is sponsored. That is the reason there is a price on the guide rather than a column of adverts running down the side of this page.
