How to Escape to Spain, the Ryanair & AirBnB Way

Fancy escaping the UK’s winter grey clouds, rain and snow, but don’t have the time to drive your motorhome to southern Spain? Here’s how we recently enjoyed a couple of weeks in Andalucia using Ryanair, a hire car and an AirBnB apartment.

Hey, This is a Motorhome Blog, Not an AirBnB Blog!

Yep, this is a motorhome blog but we occasionally wander off-piste and talk about other stuff. This time it’s non-motorhome travel. We’ve long discussed among ourselves (mostly pre-pandemic) heading abroad without the van, flying and using AirBnB to find accommodation. Up until a few weeks ago we’d not actually done it, a little wary of trying something new perhaps having grown so comfortable with motorhome travel.

We were a tad concerned we’d screw it up, maybe being ripped off by the hire car company for fuel, or damage we didn’t do. Or we’d arrive to discover there was no-one to let us into the apartment, or it would turn out to be rubbish with no hot water, screaming loud neighbours or some such. None of this happened, of course, but we did learn a few bits and bobs which we’ll share with you below.

Choosing Where to Go

OK, hands up, our imaginations failed us for a destination. Or, we opted to go somewhere we knew we’d enjoy. Up to you how you interpret it, but we headed back to Nerja on the eastern edge of the Costa Del Sol in southern Spain. We’ve spent months here on the Aula de Naturaleza campsite to the west of the town, and had gotten to know the immediate area well.

Nerja’s in the far south of Europe, only 100 miles of sea separate it from Africa. The weather reflects that fact. Over the winter it’s typically wide-open blue skies and sunshine, with the occasional cluster of overcast or rainy days. It doesn’t freeze, unless you’re up one of the 1,500m high mountains just inland. Temperatures on the coast reach around 16°C in the day and drop to maybe 8°C at night, in the cooler months.

Booking Flights

Nerja’s served by Málaga airport a 50 minute drive along the free A-7 motorway. In the UK our closest airport is East Midlands, and from previous research we knew Ryanair flew from there in just under 3 hours. They were the cheapest option for us, confirmed with sites like skyscanner.

We popped our source and destination airports into ryanair.com along with the rough dates and number of passengers. The next page shows you the flights available and costs (assuming you don’t buy any extras – see below) on a ribbon, so you can look for flights either side of the dates you’ve entered.

Lesson Learned: we arrived at Malaga on a Sunday morning and the hire car desks were rammed. When I asked if they were always so busy the lady told me “only at the weekends”. If we can, we’ll probably try and arrive on a weekday in future.

Once we’d tapped on the flights we wanted, the next page shows the types of ticket available: Value, Regular, Plus and Flexiplus. We opted for Plus for both of us, allowing us a 20Kg bag each and the option to check-in at the airport (rather than online) without additional payment.

Lesson Learned: We could have easily gotten away with Plus tickets and 10Kg cabin bags. Our check-in bags weighed 11Kg and 15Kg on return from our two-week trip (they were so light on the way out we brought back extra stuff). Our apartment had a washing machine and clothes dried quickly in the warm air, so we could have taken far fewer clothes.

Lesson Learned: The plane had three seats on either side of the aisle. Ju booked the window and aisle seat in one row, leaving the seat in between free. On both flights we ended up with the row to ourselves. On the first flight someone had been allocated the middle seat but moved to be closer to their friend after takeoff. On the second flight no-one was allocation/chose that seat.

We ignored all the other Ryanair options for insurance, hire cars and the like, booking them separately. The flights came to £272.62 for two people, return (Ryanair currently have a sale on, so if we had timed it right we could have got the flights for less than £100).

Buying Travel Insurance

During the pandemic, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (the FCDO) advised against all international travel. This made travel insurance more difficult to find and expensive, but the FCDO removed this advice months ago. We paid £26.57 for the both of us through Compare the Market (Ryanair wanted £20.99 each) for the two weeks we travelled. We picked a policy which provided cover should we need to cancel due to a positive covid test before departure. As we’re not sure when we’ll travel again, so chose not to get an annual policy.

Finding a Hire Car

We were in two minds about hiring a car in Spain. We knew we could easily get a bus or train from Málaga airport to the bus station in Málaga, and then take the bus along the coast to Nerja for about €10 each, each way. Once in Nerja we’d easy access to beaches, restaurants, supermarkets and mountain hikes on foot, so we didn’t need a car. In the end we opted to get one so we could explore places we hadn’t been able to go to on our previous visits with the motorhome, and we’re glad we did. The car cost a total of £177.01 for 12 days hire of a slightly battered (see below) Nissan Micra. Both our bags easily fitted in the boot.

We hired the car through Zest Car Rental, after looking through about half a million car hire websites. We’ve no idea whether Zest are better than any others, but it worked out fine for us. Zest are a broker, and we actually picked the car up from Record Go at the airport. We chose to pay for Zest’s ‘Top Up’ excess insurance, so we didn’t need to pay for Record Go’s more expensive excess insurance when we picked the car up. However we still had to let Record Go reserve €1,100 on our credit card, which they never actually took off the card. The hire had unlimited miles, two named drivers, in-airport pick-up (rather than taking a bus off-site) and a full-full fuel policy. They took about £70 for fuel from our credit card. On returning the car we had to fill it up within 10km of the airport and show a receipt, and we got the money back within a week.

The Record Go hire desk is a decent walk through the airport underground car park, past all the shiny Audis and BMWs from the more expensive hire car companies! When we go there we found a bit of a bunfight, with people stood around, some in a queue out the office door, some prodding at some large screens placed outside the office and looking confused. A chap was walking around talking to people, trying to keep the peace, a job it appears he has to do a fair bit!

One of us stood with the bags while the other queued and eventually went through the motions at the desk, all in English (take in your driving licenses, passports, credit card, the booking reference and the address of where you’re staying). The hirer showed an outline of the car with black triangles marking known damage and stating they only bother with scratches over 4cm. We took the paper to the car and quickly spotted a fairly hefty dent in one of the cills, where it appeared the car had been driven into a high kerb or some such. A bit more checking, even in the dark of the underground car park, and we could see lots of smaller dents, scratches and marks.

We asked the peacekeeper bloke to come and sign off the additional damage but he asked us to take the car behind the office and staff there would do it. We checked, there were no staff. We hung about a bit, wandered around the car a bit more and someone finally appeared, told us they were too busy and to just photo the damage while still in the garage. Which we did. A lot. Including a video, making it clear we were stood in the airport car park next to the hire desk. After our stay we returned the car (just follow the overhead signs to Car Rental and then look for the Record Go signs) and no-one even looked at it.

Lesson Learned: hmmm, I’m not sure we learned much other than Record Go obviously didn’t bother inspecting the cars too closely to have missed this massive dent in ours! Maybe the lesson is just that we’ll do a quick video whenever we hire a car, pointing out any obvious flaws, and then just relax about it.

The AirBnB Apartment in Nerja

We booked our apartment through AirBnB, costing a total of £548.69 for 12 nights.

We weren’t bothered about staying right next to the sea, but did want to be close to the centre of Nerja so we could walk in for ice creams, to get groceries and wander on the beaches. We we happy to cook for ourselves and weren’t fussed about the trappings of a hotel, so booked an apartment through AirBnB about 900m back from the sea front. It had two bedrooms and slept four, so we had plenty of room.

The apartment had everything we needed: comfortable bed, heating, washing machine, fully equipped kitchen, fridge freezer and 100Mbps WiFi. The best thing though was the view. Much of Nerja is relatively low rise, but the apartment was on the 7th floor of a block with balconies looking out over the inland area of the town backed by the huge mountain range of the Parque Natural de Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama.

Lesson Learned: we loved the apartment and the view, but the balcony was north-facing. It didn’t get the sun until 3pm in the afternoon in November, so while it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t warm either. A south-facing balcony would be better in the late autumn and winter.

We drove from the airport into Nerja where it proved easy to find free parking places around the beaches and apartment. Ju kept in touch with our apartment host through the AirBnB app on her phone (using Google Translate as they wrote in Spanish), and we knew we were early so chilled on the beach until we got a message we could head over there. On arriving at the apartment door the host’s son, who spoke great English, let us in, showed us around and gave us some hints for the surrounding area. He was very friendly, it was all easy going, we had no issues at all with the apartment or the owners and swapped positive reviews at the end. All good!

COVID-19 Tests and Paperwork

At the time we travelled, the following rules were in place for travel from the UK to Spain and back again. Where we could, we printed off the resulting forms to show to officials at the airport. We could have shown them on our phones, but we found it easier to have paper copies.

• We each needed to be fully vaccinated and to carry proof. We’re both jabbed, and we used the NHS app to generate a certificate each. They were valid for 30 days, so covered the full period we were out of the UK.
• We each needed to complete a Spanish ‘FCS’ form after booking our flights but before travel.
• Before flying home we had to buy a ‘Day 2’ lateral flow test (LFT), costing £16 each.
• Within 48 hours of flying home we had to complete a UK passenger locator form each.

This all took a while to do, but it was straight-forward enough and we travelled through the various airline and airport check points without a hitch.

Phones, Internet and TV

Our phones both have 1pmobile PAYG SIMs, which work in Spain with no additional cost. We can use these to access the internet on our phones, but that costs 1p per MB, which is roughly £10 per GB, which is pretty expensive. Instead, we took our Huawei personal wireless hotspot device with a Superdrug Mobile PAYG SIM in it. This gives us unlimited data in Spain (and the UK, and lots of other countries) for £20 a month with no roaming charge. We only needed this when out and about as the apartment had 100Mbps WiFi.

Our apartment’s TV had a Spanish Amazon Fire TV stick which worked very well on the apartment WiFi. The interface was in Spanish, but easy to navigate. However, the stick content was also ‘localised’ to Spain, meaning we couldn’t watch BBC iPlayer, or continue watching some of the series we were watching at home.

We took our UK Fire TV stick and remote with us and popped that into the TV. That worked, but would only access UK-restricted apps like iPlayer unless we also used our own internet, not the apartment WiFi. The Superdrug SIM connected fine to 4G networks but watching TV wasn’t seamless. It would freeze from time to time, the 4G internet not fast enough to stream smoothly, even at our town centre location. It wasn’t annoying us enough to not use it though.

What Happened Afterwards

We arrived home about 11:30pm on Friday and did our Day 2 LFTs on Saturday morning, both were negative. On Monday Ju was feeling a bit off so did an NHS LFT, which was also negative. She started with a cough on Wednesday, so we both took another NHS LFT. Ju’s quickly showed she was positive for the virus, a real shock after tens of negative tests over the past months. Mine was still negative.

We both booked in for PCR tests, at a nearby test site that morning, and stayed home afterwards. Before getting the results an NHS track and trace notification came through to say we’d been a contact of someone who’d tested positive, indicating the date of the flight home as the start of our ‘isolation period’. Technically, as we’re both vaccinated we didn’t need to isolate but did of course, waiting for the PCR results to come through.

On Thursday morning we got the results: Ju had COVID but I didn’t. She had to complete a test and trace process with all of her contacts, but we’re in touch with all our ‘close contacts’ and thankfully she doesn’t appear to have passed it on. I’ve tested negative six times and feel fine, despite being in the confines of the Cooler most of the time with Ju. Weird.

Ju’s had the symptoms of a bad cold/mild flu: coughing a lot, blocked nose, a mild fever, and she’s also lost her senses of taste and smell. This is the 8th day since symptoms started and she’s tested negative today on an LFT. She’s reported she’d feeling quite a lot better now, fingers crossed it stays that way.

Was It All Worth It?

Yep. Easy for me to say, I haven’t got the ‘rona. We were also lucky we encountered the virus on our way home rather than on our way to Spain. But Ju says she’s happy we went too, and she’s suffered as a result of going. We really enjoyed our time in Spain, among other things we did this:

• Hiked up the 1,500m(ish) El Cielo to mark the anniversary of mum’s death.
• Sea kayaked on a beautifully calm day, watching fish and jellyfish beneath us.
• Walked to Acebuchal, the mountain hamlet rebuilt 50 years after Franco forcibly evacuated it.
• Walked the Moorish acequia (waterway) north of Frigiliana.
• Visited the bay of Playa de la Cala el Cañuelo east of Maro, freeing a trapped deer on the way.
• Ate out sat outside the low-cost restuarants and beach bars of Nerja and Frigiliana.
• Tucked into gelato (ice cream) at Ju’s favourite place on the Plaza Balcón de Europa in Nerja.
• Walked the beach of La Herradura and the warren of streets in the old town of Almuñécar.
• Headed inland to have a look around the white village of Cómpeta.
• Explored the Moorish, Roman and modern sights of Málaga.

The total cost for the flights, hire car, travel insurance, airBnB and Day 2 tests for two people came to £1056.89 for a 12 day trip. We could have gotten a cheaper package deal, but we enjoyed our own apartment and having a hire car.

Comparison to a Motorhome Trip

Out of curiosity, we priced up doing a two week trip here in the motorhome. We know that some folks do come to Spain for a fortnight in their vans, but personally we’d prefer a longer trip. Costs came in at:

• £895 return for the ferry (with cabin) from Portsmouth to Santander
• £250 for the campsite for 12 nights (although we could free camp, just not in Nerja as they have clamped down on it)
• £200 for diesel (but that doesn’t include wear and tear from those extra miles on Zagan)

So, it actually worked out about the same, if not a bit less than bringing our motorhome here.

Any Tips to Add?

Over to you guys, any hints and tips for this style of travel? Feel free to pop ’em in the comments below.

Cheers, more photos below, Jay