Simon Gage travels to Madrid for £8 with Avios and British Airways. He also gets a five-star hotel and rental car on the loyalty scheme.
Free holidays. Who doesn’t want them? So, here I am, £6 later – actually, I’m staying three nights, so £8 – having lunch on a beautifully landscaped roof, beneath an arbour of jasmine with lashings of rosé, a sangria chaser and the infinity-style pool overlooking the opera house right there.
Downstairs is my room – huge, with an arty rococo headboard and white bouclé sofa. Below that, the spacious, white-on-white bar and lounge, with its quirky furniture and concrete pool table.
Plaza Mayor is five minutes away , while the Palacio Real Basically, you’re exactly where you need to be. British Airways I have a friend who has even worked out how to put his mortgage on his card and, as a result, hasn’t paid for a British Airways flight for years.
Collecting Avios points got me London to Madrid flights – and a hotel Because if you work those points like a pro, you too could be on my all-Avios British Airways flight from London City Airport to Madrid , restaurants like BLoved, which has that scarce commodity in Spain: vegan food, and a scoot round the Palacio Real district just for photo opps – we’re all about spaffing those points on a car. Obviously, you can take the train , or you can drive just an hour outside Madrid to the UNESCO Heritage town of Toledo, an ancient city on a hill, once the most important in all of Espana.
We’ve bagged a great guide, Adolfo, so we get tours not only of churches, synagogues that look like mosques and the winding streets of this smack-in-the-mouth gorgeous little town with all the history eased into our ears, but we also get lunch at La Ermitaña overlooking the river. It’s all we can do to keep our eyes on our watermelon salad, the view is that drop-dead. The staff are sick of being asked to take photographs.
Our other trip out is to Cuenca, famous for its Hanging Houses – Casas Colgadas – 16th century ‘sky-scrapers’ that you get to over a wobbly bridge across a ravine. The old town is a fabulous mix of Spain’s only abstract art gallery – the building is almost as impressive as the art – and a cathedral way too big for this small town.
That’s what happens when you make your fortune on wool production, you can afford the bling including ultra-modern windows in a proper Gothic cathedral. There are even Michelin-star restaurants, where the tasting-menu courses never stop coming. Sadly, we’ve had too many of those courses and can’t actually hack it when it comes to the crunch. Looks fun though.
If you have the hire car – you soon get used to the other-side-of-the-road thing – you might as well head out to Consuegra, where the famous windmills that Don Quixote fought against are still actually grinding grain into flour up on a hill. White-on-white luxury at The Edition hotel Oh, and don’t forget the castle where Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote – the most famous book in the Spanish language, in case you were wondering – once stayed and took in these same views across the orange plains of Castilla-La Mancha .
If you look through actual CCTV footage of our stay, much more of it is spent quaffing cava-based sangria on the roof of the Edition, ordering up after-hours martinis in the bar, which is so glamorous we’re surprised they let us in, and eating late at night in fancy restaurants. Hotel accommodation at The Madrid EDITION booked through British Airways Holidays, and selecting ‘Save with Avios’ cost £1 + 58,200 Avios* Car hire with Avis/Budget booked through British Airways Holidays, and selecting ‘Save with Avios’ £1 + 6,500 Avios** .
*Avios amount varies based on duration, season, hotel, and room type selected, but the £1 remains a flat fee per booking. See avios.comUpgrade your lip routine with 15% off Delilah’s bestselling productsLucy DaltroffEleanor NoyceI'm a sex worker — this is what men with small penises always ask forWhat does the week have in store? Tarot horoscope reading for June 8 to June 14
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