Hey y’all! Andrew here! I’ve been to nearly 40 countries, and yet somehow I’ve never made it to España. So when my girlfriend got an invite to a wedding outside of Madrid, we knew we had to jump at the opportunity. Today, I’m going to walk you through my process for booking and planning a trip to Spain on a budget! After each section, I’ll highlight how much that part of the trip cost, and I’ll share the grand total at the end! You’ll see that a 10-day vacation to a major European city is a lot more affordable than you might think.
Finding the Cheapest Flights to Spain
Flights are numero uno when you’re planning a long-distance trip. Book ‘em first, figure everything else out second.
Fortunately for me, flying out of DC can be pretty affordable, but flying out of New York is always the absolute cheapest option. Fortunately getting from DC to NYC is really simple with buses like Megabus, OurBus, BestBus, BoltBus – ALL the buses. They’re affordable, generally run on time, and are a great alternative to spending at $100 more on flights. It also helps that NYC is a great meeting point for my girlfriend and me since she’s based out of Boston.
Whenever I look for flights, I make sure and check Skyscanner, Google Flights and Kayak first, and those usually give me the best available prices. But this time around, the cheapest flight I could find was actually by searching through my Chase Ultimate Rewards portal and booking using my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. Not only did we score $231 roundtrip tickets from NYC to Madrid, but I was able to use Ultimate Rewards points to completely cover my flight.
FLIGHT TO MADRID: FREE!
Click here to learn more about our best strategies for finding cheap flights!
Note About Basic Economy
Flying on Basic Economy is great if you’re looking to save money, don’t care about where you sit, and don’t need to check a bag. If you do, it can be more costly than just buying the regular economy ticket. But if you’re looking to save money, it pays to be as flexible as possible.
FLIGHTS BOOKED! What’s Next?
Once flights are booked, the next step is a little holistic. We need to figure out what all we’re actually going to be doing in Spain, so we can decide what to book next. If we’ve got anything immovable in the schedule, we should figure that out first. In this case, we’re going to a wedding in Avila – just outside of Madrid – where the accommodations set aside for us are just 30€ ($33) for the whole weekend! Since that’s set in stone, it only makes sense to start there and work our way out.
How are we getting from Madrid to Avila on Friday, and how are we getting back on Sunday? Initially, we thought about renting a car, but parking a car in Madrid can be difficult, we’d be limited to accommodations that offer free parking, and none of those places were likely to be in the city center. So instead, we decided we should take advantage of Spain’s awesome and affordable train system, which also opened us up to staying anywhere we want in the center of Madrid!
TRAIN TICKET TO AVILA: $15 each way
WEDDING HOTEL FOR TWO NIGHTS: $33
Bookending Avila
OKAY! So we land in Madrid on Tuesday morning. We’ll be in Avila Friday to Sunday, then take off again from Madrid the following Thursday at 9am. How should we fill in the days before and after the wedding weekend? Obviously, I need to spend at least a couple days in Madrid proper to experience the city! So before we worry about what we’re going to do after the wedding, let’s work on finding somewhere to stay in Madrid.
Where to Stay in Madrid?
This part can sometimes take a little while. Right now my favorite sites for booking accommodations are Booking.com and AirBnB. Booking.com is great because unlike Hotels.com it offers more than just hotels. It includes everything from apartment stays to hostels to boats and camper vans! It also has a decent rewards program called Genius that gives you discounts after booking with them just a couple times. As for AirBnB, they also offer tons of unique and different options in great locations but the kicker here is how much you can make back in rewards. I recently wrote an article about how you can maximize rewards by booking stays through AirBnB. Check it out!
For Madrid, we ended up going with a really cute place on AirBnB that’s literally in the central tourism square of the city center: Plaza Mayor. It’s also totally affordable at $56/night for a total of $113 for two nights split between the two of us.
MADRID AIRBNB FOR TWO NIGHTS: $56
Post-Wedding Shenanigans
This is where things jump the shark a little bit. While exploring bus, train and plane tickets to various other cities in Spain, I happened to notice that RyanAir had $70 flights to Lanzarote – one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa (the Canaries are officially part of Spain). And, uh… that… well… that peaked my interest. I started doing a little MORE exploring and researching, and I casually threw some dates into my Hopper app to track the flight prices over the next few days while we discussed how we wanted to spend our last few days in Spain.
One morning, a couple days later, as Lara and I were sitting out on the deck drinking coffee in Sun Valley, Idaho, I happened to do one more check of Google Flights to see if the prices had changed.
$45. Tickets from Madrid to Lanzarote were now just $45 round trip. “Uhhhhhh….. Lara…….”
Thirty minutes later we were booked: leaving Sunday night from Madrid and returning Wednesday evening for two and a half days of volcanoes and beaches.
Ryan Air from Spain to Lanzarote
Since RyanAir is an ultra low budget carrier, you pay for *everything*. Seat assignments, checked bags, carry-on bags, the whole shebang. We decided to spring for the seat selection so we could actually sit next to each other this time. HEY BIG SPENDERS! But to offset it, we’re planning on storing our bags in a locker in Madrid until our return, and making the whole three day trip to the islands with nothing but a small personal bag for each of us! #Adventure. What else do you really need besides a swimsuit anyway?
FLIGHTS TO LANZAROTE: $64
To Van or Not to Van
THERE ARE SO MANY COOL PLACES YOU CAN STAY ON LANZAROTE! Boats, RVs, Yurts, camper vans. Now – here’s the thing. I don’t know how to drive a manual. I mean. I do. I logically understand it. But I don’t have a whole lot of practice. When looking up car rentals in Lanzarote, automatics were crazy expensive, and then if we paired that with hotels, we’d end up spending a pretty penny. That definitely wasn’t on the agenda. But a quick perusal of AirBnB led to an amazing discovery: epic camper vans for rent that could serve both as car AND hotel in ONE! The only problem? They were all manuals.
So there I was. Epic dilemma in front of me. Book the manual camper van with REALLY CUTE BLUE NAUTICAL THEMED INTERIOR and learn to drive stick in the next three weeks, or spend boat loads of cash on an automatic and find a hotel? C’mon. You know how this ends.
CAMPER VAN FOR THREE NIGHTS: $90
Dancing the Night Away
There’s one more night to account for on our trip: the night we return to Madrid from Lanzarote before we fly out the next morning. The flight’s at 9am, so we’ll need to be at the airport at 7am, so obviously the solution is Lara and I meet up with her good friend the night before and dance in salsa clubs until 5am and hop a cab to the airport. Seems reasonable, right? So yeah… We’re uh… not booking a place for our last night and we’re just gonna wing it. C’est la vie! Wait, wrong country.
To Recap!
Flights: $64
Accommodations: $179
Transportation: $30
TOTAL COST FOR A TEN DAY TRIP TO SPAIN: $273*
*before daily expenses
RIGHT!? Pretty insane, huh? But that’s how we do it, folks! Feel free to reach out with any questions you may have! I’m Looking forward to sharing a full recap of this adventure when I’m back in the States! Stay tuned!