What a treatment week in Chișinău costs beyond the clinic

This guide covers travel, process and cost. It contains no clinical advice.

Being in Chișinău is cheap, and this is the line people over-budget rather than under-budget. Crowd-sourced averages put an inexpensive meal at 200 lei, a three-course dinner for two at 850 lei, a taxi at 40 lei plus 6 lei per kilometre and a public transport ticket at 7 lei — roughly £8.60, £36, £1.70 plus 26p per kilometre, and 30p. On those figures a comfortable non-treatment budget for a week is well under £300 excluding your room.

The daily figures

A realistic week, eating out most days and taking taxis rather than buses, lands somewhere around 2,500 to 3,500 lei per person — roughly £107 to £150. That is the whole non-accommodation, non-flight, non-treatment cost of the trip. It is not where your money goes.

How treatment changes the shape of the week

The average tourist budget assumes seven ordinary days. A treatment week is not seven ordinary days. Expect a normal first day, a surgical day, then a day or two where you want soft food, quiet and a short walk to the clinic rather than a restaurant reservation. Then the last days return to normal.

The line we will not put a number on

Flights are the largest variable in this budget and the one we deliberately leave blank. Wizz Air flies non-stop from Luton and Stansted, and FlyOne, HiSky and SkyUp from Dublin; the hop from London is a little over three hours. But a fare published today is wrong within a week, and a wrong number on a page about budgeting is worse than no number at all.

So price your own dates before you commit to anything else, then put the real figure into your own table. If a site quotes you a confident flight price for a trip six months away, that tells you something about how it treats every other number on the page.