City Hopping – Money saving faux pas, sbaglio, error!!

After a summer of sunshine and relaxing it’s been hard to get back into writing about my travels. It’s also been hard going back to work, but those non-teachers who read this probably couldn’t care less about that. Anyway I digress... Let’s talk about one (in fact it’s really related to two) of my trips this Summer. In a nutshell, I made a huge mistake. Now let me tell you the story of both trips, which will hopefully help you understand why.

As you know, from my last blog I travelled to Venice in July to discover a small part of Italy – a place I had never been to before. And what a place it is! I was warned of over-crowding and that it would be smelly; neither of which it was. My new boyfriend (Tristan) joined me on my (what was meant to be solo) holiday and we certainly had the best time adventuring around the city – mostly espresso martini hunting and slowly becoming what we later called “Carbzillas”. The food and drink were both amazing and wandering the street and canals of Venice was beautiful.

Before leaving from Venice we’d decided to go to Madrid shortly after. The reason for the Madrid visit was to watch Tash Sultana perform. She is a singer/songwriter who was on my bucket list to see, and if you haven’t heard of her look her up now! She is awesome and was fantastic live! She was performing at Mad Cool Festival. I have been to Madrid a lot of times - due to one of my best friends (Harriet) having lived there for 8 years - although I had never attended before. The festival was great, although slightly overpriced for drinks once you were in there. We saw lots of acts and had a really fun evening (it starts at 5pm due to the heat in the middle of the Summer). We stayed in Madrid for a few days at Harriet’s friend Jacqui’s apartment, (so kind of her to put us up!) meaning we saved money on accommodation while we were out there. When we weren’t at the festival, I also got to show Tristan all the sights of Madrid as it was his first time there and I wanted to show him everything. It’s one of my favourite cities.

The advice I am going to give you isn’t about Venice and it isn’t about Madrid... no no no! It’s about travelling from one city to another.

Here were our travel plans: Bristol > Venice, Venice > Bristol, Stansted > Madrid, Madrid > Stansted. I guess this wouldn’t be too bad to just look at, but here’s where things get messy: We were due to get back into Bristol from Venice @ 23:00 and fly out from Stansted @ 08:00 (these are rounded up/down times to the nearest hours). However, it takes 3 or so hours to get from Bristol to Stansted, and we stupidly thought it would be ok to get into Bristol and fly out of Stansted with less than 9 hours between landing and take-off times. To add to the drama, Ryanair’s flight out of Venice was two hours late taking off so we didn’t actually land in Bristol until 1am. You are probably thinking – ‘WHAT WERE YOU THINKING TAMMIE?!’ And you’d be right! I will never (and I mean NEVER) do this again. We’d looked at flights straight to Madrid from Venice, and flights from Bristol to Madrid but it all worked out cheaper to go from Stansted (including a night in the Stansted hotel with parking) so we went with it. This was a poor choice on our part! We were exhausted, and the drive between Bristol and Stansted seemed much longer at that time of night when nothing seemed to be going your way (and I slept for most of it – poor Tristan!) A quick pit stop – a very quick pit stop (2 hours sleep) at the hotel at Stanstead airport - and we were driving to park the car to get our flight to Madrid.

We checked the Ryanair app to see if the flight was on time and it was...So up we got and off to the airport we went. However, upon arrival, the flight was delayed and that’d been known for hours – we were not happy that we’ lost those precious extra hours we needed in bed! In fact, all four of our flights were with Ryanair and they were all delayed. We were not in the slightest impressed with Ryanair during this escapade.

So... Tammie’s top travel tip here – USE YOUR COMMON SENSE! We were so focused on saving the money that we actually didn’t think this through properly at all.

Money saving is great but think about the logistics. Having been through this now, our advice would be: check how much you will actually save and weigh that up with the lack of sleep, extra effort and stress it can cause. I would also say to definitely leave longer than 9 hours between flights if you have to drive to different airport 3.5 hours away (but again that’s probably common sense)! Lastly, think about the airlines you are flying with are they reliable, and if the flights are close together - are you likely to be cutting it fine if they are renowned for being late/delayed?) We were actually considering never flying Ryanair again, but we have recently booked another flight with them to Rome in October – which will be their last chance to prove they aren’t completely useless!

To summarise:

· Use your common sense.

· Stansted feels like it’s in Scotland when you are driving up the motorway at 3am after flying on a delayed Ryanair flight from Venice.

· Weigh up the pros and cons of the money saved with the extra effort involved.

· Leave a decent amount of time between flights if you are city hopping to save money.

· Think about your airline choice and its reliability so that you aren’t cutting it too fine with the rest of your schedule.

As always - if anyone has any similar advice to add on any of this, or you would just like to ridicule our lack of common sense, please do leave a comment.

All drama aside, Venice and Madrid were both amazing trips and the time we had wasn’t dampened by our stupidity in travel planning. If anyone would like any advice or ideas of things to do and see in either place, just hit me up.

My next blog piece is about our end of Summer trip to Alicante and includes more money saving advice, as well as some cool places to visit in a city I hadn’t heard much about.

‘Til next time... Adios :)

The fools!!