This year’s sum­mer tour was of to Jerez de la Fron­tera in Andalu­cia, Spain. Where we were from July, 1^st until July 7^th.

My friend Clau­dio had invited us to his lovely home in the city cen­tre of Jerez. So we had a great place to stay and the best local guide you could imagine!

Actual flight plans and prices led us to tak­ing a rather unusual route from Ham­burg to Jerez and back using RyanAir:

• Start­ing on June, 30^th from Lübeck (LBC — 60km north­east of Ham­burg) to Stansted (STY — 60km north of London)
• Doing some sight­see­ing in Lon­don and hav­ing lunch at Jamie Oliver’s famous restau­rant Fif­teen.
• On July, 1^st tak­ing the next plane from Stansted (STY) to Jerez de la Fron­tera (XRY).
• Going back from Jerez to Lübeck via Stansted.

The whole adven­ture was cheaper than tak­ing a direct flight from Ham­burg to Jerez, but beware that RyanAir has some back­draws you have to arrange with:

• There are no seat reser­va­tions. The first 65 peo­ple who checked in are the first to run into the plane and grab them­selves a nice place, all oth­ers fol­low there­after tak­ing what’s left. So if you want to sit together with two or more peo­ple, bet­ter check in early and be fast to rush into the plane — it’s like it was back in school when you tried to get the best places inside that bus that took the whole class to wherever…
• There is no con­nec­tion guar­an­tee and your lug­gage isn’t trans­fered to your con­nect­ing flights! That is really nasty! You’ll have to plan at least three hours between two RyanAir flights for pos­si­ble delays, get­ting out of the plane, run­ning down end­less halls (that’s a Stansted spe­cial), tak­ing back your lug­gage, get­ting out into the hall, checking-in again (usu­ally with large ques in front of the desks) and get­ting your­self searched for weapons and stuff again. And don’t for­get your long way back from the shopping-area to the gates (in Stansted that’s an esti­mated 12 minutes!).

On the other hand I must say, it all worked per­fectly well. A direct flight (HAM-XRY) was about €650 per per­son, that RyanAir jug­gle includ­ing a double-room at Stansted cost about €400 for both of us — with a bit more of a hassle.

To be continued…