My £8 weekend in Madrid — a £1 hotel and £5 return flights

A £1 hotel room? Simon Gage reveals how he did it, and how you can, too (Picture: Getty Images)

Free holidays. Who doesn’t want them?

Well, not free exactly, but more or less.

Return flight to Madrid? £5. A stay in the fabulous Madrid Edition, the only five-star hotel in town with a rooftop pool? £1 a night.

Car hire so you can jaunt out to historic towns like Toledo and Cuenca? £1 a day. That’ll do nicely!

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.

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The rooftop at The Edition Madrid (Picture: Nikolas Koenig)

Then it’s down the sculptural staircase, lousy with Instagrammers into the centre of Spain’s buzzing capital.

Plaza Mayor is five minutes away (don’t miss the San Miguel food market, a tapas-lover’s paradise), while the Palacio Real (biggest royal residence in Europe: take that Buckingham Palace!), the Almudena Cathedral and (perhaps more importantly) the shopping area around Sol are all within walking distance.

Even the Prado, one of the world’s most famous museums, and the Reina Sofia museum, the best greatest-hits-of-world-art collections we’ve ever been to, are only a stroll away. And the Retiro park.

Madrid’s gleaming white Royal Palace (Picture: Javier Sanchez)

Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez in the Prado Museum in Madrid del Prado (Picture: Belen Imaz Comunidad de Madrid)

Party spots like Malasana and the gay district of Chueca are also walkable.

Basically, you’re exactly where you need to be.

All you have to do – and this is the science bit – is be canny with your Avios points.

You know Avios points, those things you get if you have a British Airways American Express or Barclaycard. Then do all your spending through that.

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.

Or you can use Avios Shop, which filters you through to say, John Lewis; when you buy something, up go your points.

Collecting Avios points got me London to Madrid flights – and a hotel (Picture: Getty Images)

Or, spend at Pizza Express, book theatre tickets through Today Tix or earn them through Uber.

It’s everyday spending which can give you an extraordinary treat at the end.

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 (we’ve got enough for Business Class so they’re already pouring the champagne!).

The idea behind the British Airways all-Avios flights – celebrating their 50th with the one we’re on, by the way – is to take up the slack of people with points burning holes in their pockets who sometimes find they can’t get the exact flight they want on popular routes like Cape Town at Christmas, Corfu, Barbados…

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• The ‘intimate’ Barcelona alternative with £34 flights
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And though we do Madrid – rooftop bars (not as nice as ours!), 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 (cheap and easy and actually quite nice), 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.

Beautiful Toledo (Picture: Simon Gage)

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.

The houses of Cuenca (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

There are even Michelin-star restaurants, where the tasting-menu courses never stop coming.

And of course, the famous zipline – the longest urban zipline in Europe! – across the ravine.

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.

Pick up some cheap olive oil and saffron or maybe take in one of the indie festivals they host.

White-on-white luxury at The Edition hotel (Picture: Nikolas Koenig)

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 (where Manchego cheese comes from, so don’t miss that).

But that’s just us showing off.

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 (so Spanish) in fancy restaurants.

We’ve saved money on our flights, hotels and car hire, so we can afford it.

The essentials

Simon’s trip on an Avios-only flight from London City Airport to Madrid cost him £2.50 plus 14,000 Avios each way. Business Class is £20 + 24,500 Avios each-way.

Hotel accommodation at The Madrid EDITION booked through British Airways Holidays, and selecting ‘Save with Avios’ cost £1 + 58,200 Avios* (per room per night based on 2 adults)

Car hire with Avis/Budget booked through British Airways Holidays, and selecting ‘Save with Avios’ £1 + 6,500 Avios** (per day).

*Avios amount varies based on duration, season, hotel, and room type selected, but the £1 remains a flat fee per booking. See avios.com

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