I have a few questions I was hoping someone could help me out with.
1 - We are flying to Madrid but have a layover in Amsterdam. Do we go through customs in Amsterdam or do we treat it like any other connecting flight? Or will we do customs in Madrid?
2 - After arriving in Madrid, we are going straight to Seville. I know we need to take a train from the airport to the Atocha train station. Should I buy tickets from Madrid to Seville ahead of time or is that one I can do when I get there?
You will go through immigration/passport control in the Netherlands and customs in Madrid. If you have nothing to declare, you’ll pick up your luggage and follow the nothing to declare signs out of the terminal.
Because of the possibility of a flight being delayed or cancelled, I’d hold off on buying train tickets until you arrive. Others who have made that connection can better inform you.
As was mentioned, In Amsterdam you will go through immigration to the Schengen area. Once off the plane, you are just released into the international terminal, follow the signs for connecting flights. You do need to know your concourse and gate for the connecting flight, as you get split off into different queues leaving the international terminal for immigration. Once through, head to your gate. If you have a tight connection, there is a monitor at the beginning of each queue showing which passengers can use the "express" lane, but we had an hour and 15 minute transfer, flight was not on the monitor, and made it with plenty of time.
To get to Atocha station, it depends a bit what terminal you come in on. The Metro may work better than train (Train only leaves from Terminal 4, Metro is handier for Terminals 1,2, and 3), and a direct bus may be better than both, or a cab if needed.
The situation with the train from Madrid to Seville is a bit tricky. The normal (and totally logical) advice is not to buy that ticket until you arrive in Spain, because you just never know when you'll arrive. The train station at Madrid-Barajas airport is staffed, and those folks will sell you an appropriately-timed ticket to Seville.
However, there are two other factors to consider:
Cost. I don't know when you're traveling, but if it's well into the future, the cost of a ticket you buy now is likely to be a lot lower than what you'll pay upon arrival in Madrid. You'd need to check cancellation/change policies carefully to see how much you stand to lose if you do not arrive in Spain at the anticipated time and cannot take the train you're booked on. And saving however much (100-150 euros in total on two tickets? I'm just guessing.) may not mean all that much to you.
Availability. It is not at all uncommon for express trains on the Barcelona-Madrid-Cordoba-Seville line to sell out. Sometimes I see several "Full" trains on a given day. It would be frustrating to land in Madrid and find you had to wait 4, 5, 6 hours for a train with available seats. You can easily monitor ticket availability on your travel date in the days leading up to your travel date so you'll know whether trains are beginning to sell out. There's at least one additional company running express trains to Seville, Iryo, so that's another place to look for tickets it Renfe has a lot of sold-out trains. You might need to get the Iryo ticket on the company's website; I don't know that it has vending machines at the airport.
If your itinerary isn't fully locked down yet, my suggestion would be to move things around a bit and make your first stop a place closer to Madrid, so the amount of money you have tied up in a ticket purchased ahead of time (if you decide to do that) isn't so great. The obvious answer is to go to Toledo. The next-best standard destination is Cordoba.
Thanks for the replies. I was informed by my wife that I had it wrong. We will be taking the train from Madrid to Cordoba, not Seville.
