Spain 2020: Getting Around

NOTE -> This trip occurred pre-COVID-19 and feels like 100 years ago

In most of our trips to Europe we try to use public transportation to get around. It’s usually the cheapest option and can give you a great view of the real city you might not get from a taxi or tour bus. We were planning to do the same on this trip.

In Barcelona I was delaying which public transit ticket to by until the very last minute. I had read about several tourist options that ranged from unlimited public transport use during your stay to ones that also included discounts to museums and other attractions in addition to the free transportation pass. I was trying to do the math to figure out what the better deal was, but I wasn’t sure the activities we were going to do.

In the end, a few hours before we left I purchased a 72 hour (3 day) pass for just the unlimited use of the public transit in Barcelona. It seemed like we would break even if we used it at least 3-4 times per day. While the pass included transit from the airport, we’d use a taxi to get to the hotel to avoid adding stress after a long red-eye flight since the trip to the hotel would involve at least one transfer and a 10 minute walk with our luggage. That’s not something we’d be up for at that point. Once we got to the hotel it would be easier to figure out where to go and how to navigate the public transport system. Everything we had read indicated it would be $30-35 to get from the airport to our hotel so it would be money well spent.

The tickets I purchased online weren’t actually tickets, but a voucher code. We could redeem it at any subway station ticket machine by entering the number on the voucher.

In Valencia we are only going to be there 2 days so we decided we’d focus on using taxi’s there rather than trying to figure out the public transit. The city is small and we assumed the city’s transit system was relatively limited.

In Madrid, we decided to wait until we got there before deciding. There were passes we could buy for varying lengths, but we hadn’t done much research on that part of the trip to know what we’d need. Plus the hotel situation was changing quickly at the time so we decided to hold off.

Of course we also needed to get between the cities. I had read several blogs and websites describing the ticketing process and recommending sites to buy the tickets in English as the main site is in Spanish had inconsistent behavior with US credit cards and were inconsistently translated to English.

I ended up buying the Barcelona to Valencia leg using the UK version of raileurope.com. The site made it clear the route options and prices and only charged a few dollars in fees for it’s service. It was completely worth it, even though my wife is a native Spanish speaker. There were several options and times to choose from. We wanted to take an express train that had few if any stops along the way. The local train took more than twice as long to go the same distance and was only a few dollars cheaper. Our itinerary took 2 hours and 40 minutes and left at 7:15 in the morning so it was one of the first trains out of Barcelona and the first one headed to Valencia.

I decided to wait to buy the ticket from Valencia to Barcelona until after we had experience on the first leg. From scanning the ticket prices it seemed buying a few days ahead didn’t necessarily cause the tickets to be too much more expensive. We also wanted to see if we wanted an earlier or later itinerary before committing.