STAYING IN SPAIN FOR FREE

Getting so excited for our impending trip to Spain.  As you may know we are very experienced at hospitality and home exchange.  We have hosted over 300 people in our home and love every minute of it.  On this trip to Spain we will stay with people we have met through home exchange sites like HomeExchange.com and HomeforExchange.com.

We arrive in Madrid and are going to stay in a hotel for 2 nights.  I could have stayed with some friends there but I do not sleep on planes, so I opted for a hotel for 2 nights to recuperate.

I AM going to use my new SPG AMERICAN EXPRESS card that gives a 30,000 points sign-up bonus!  I also get 3x points for using the card to pay for the room!  Starwood has great deals going on for a week in many properties around the world for less than 30,000 points.  Crazy, a one-week stay for free!  Check out a great blog, Million Mile Secrets, he has great info about these programs on Starwood.

From Madrid we will go stay with Karin and her 9-year old son.  I love staying with families because my daughter has someone with whom she can play.  It also presents a FABULOUS cultural and language interaction that can’t be had in hotels.   We have never met this family but I proposed a hospitality exchange instead of a home exchange.  She was taken aback but then trilled at the idea.  I have been looking at her Facebook page and she looks amazingly nice.

From there we will fly to Marrakesh, Morocco for a week.  I thought, it’s so close, never been and I gotta go.  I tried endlessly to do a home/hospitality with no luck.  I ended up finding a great deal on Booking.com.  I got the cheapest price on any site for a week at the Aqua Resort, my daughter will flip when she sees this place.  I am going to have guides take us around to see first hand the amazing landscapes and sites.   It will be fun anyway.

From there we go to Malaga to stay with an AMAZING family who stayed with us a couple of weeks ago.  We had so much fun together and became fast friends.  It was mom, dad, daughter 9 and uncle.  Ellie and I are both so happy to be seeing them again!  Now they will show us all around their area in Spain.  STAY TUNED…

That’s not all, from there we head to Barcelona, maybe with a stop in Valencia.  In Barcelona we will stay with a family who did a hospitality stay back in February.   The Gomez family was fantastic too! I know, it sounds so cliché. BUT TRUE!  Our daughters did everything together.  When mine woke she would ask “is Claudia awake?”.  They were inseparable.

We will stay about 10 days in Barcelona and live with friends that we met through websites.  As I keep saying, I am always looking for friends I just haven’t met yet.

You should try it.  It really does open your eyes to totally different experiences.  It’s like staying with family, only better 😉.