Flying home from Seville

Folks I know who've done it have all trained back to Madrid to fly home. To be on the safe side, unless you have a mid-afternoon or later flight, it's best to spend the night in Madrid. The trains are fast and comfortable, but you'll need a taxi to the train station in Seville, then a transfer at Atocha station in Madrid to an airport train.

The flights were much better from Madrid. We spent a few extra days in Seville and took a day trip to Cordoba, which turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip. We trained back to Madrid, had a last celebration meal very late, overnighted and flew back early the next day. Sleep on the plane came easily.

I took a train to Madrid (with a stopover in Cordoba (highly recommended if you have time), then a few more days in Madrid and a taxi to the airport for the night before a morning flight. So I didn't have to worry about connection times. If you have time, consider the train to Madrid and one night there, either in the city or at the airport depending on flight time the next day.

Lisbon isn't a realistic alternative. Going by rail from Seville requires multiple changes and takes a long time, bus is a little easier.

Yeah, Lisbon is no better, and doesn't have as many flights as a place like Madrid. We've found that it's hard to exhaust Madrid, so a night or two, followed by a low-cost subway to the airport is not a bad end to a trip.

One example of "hard to exhaust" might be the convents that were only by appointment/guided-tour, long before Covid. Have you been to the most overlooked museum, the Accademia des Bellas Artes, an easy walk from Puerta del Sol? It's a big city, with a lot of history.

Gretchen, I ended up taking the train to Madrid, spending my last night there, and then flying home from Madrid. I enjoyed an extra day of touring in Madrid and visited a museum that I didn’t make it to during the tour and enjoyed going out for tapas. I found the flight choices from Seville pretty limited.

After looking at the alternatives--flying to Boston from either Madrid or Lisbon--we decided to travel via Lisbon since we hadn't been to Portugal. We took a train to Cordoba in the morning after our tour ended and spent a day and night there. We returned to Seville late afternoon, spent the night there, and had an early flight to Lisbon. We had the rest of that day and the next there, including a bus trip to Sintra, Cascais, and Estoril. It was lovely, and we'd like to go back someday after that introduction. We did have a stop in Frankfort on our return, and I don't recall if that would have been necessary if we went to Madrid, but we really enjoyed our brief stop in Lisbon.

As many have said, we took the high speed train back to Madrid after spending 2 extra days in Seville which was our favorite city on the tour. We then spent 1 night in Madrid and flew out the next day home.

One-stop flight options like Air France/KLM/Delta via Paris or Lufthansa/United via Frankfurt take that long because they include an overnight in the airline’s hub city before a morning departure from that city. If any typical hub cities interest you for a longer stay, including London or Amsterdam, then you could book that infra-European flight separately (see sky scanner.com) and usually get a direct flight from those northern hubs to Seattle.

I would prefer that to 21-22 hours via Barcelona and Newark, which is one option I see. You would go through customs and immigration in Newark and then have only domestic flight amenities instead of international amenities for a long portion of the trip.

We took the My Way Spain trip in 2019. We chose to fly out of Seville which has a small easy to navigate airport. We flew to Amsterdam for a quick trip as it was on our way home and would have been a layover. We used Vueling Airline which was very reasonable and it worked great. The city of Amsterdam is a quick train ride from the airport so it was easy getting in and out of the city. 2 days was plenty to see the Anne Frank House, the Rijksmuseum and most of the city.

Better way is to take the train back to Madrid as it is a lovely peaceful ride... I stopped over in Cordoba for a few hours on the way.. Stayed at a Hilton right at the Madrid airport and took flight out from there. I've also done the connecting flights but find the connections awkward and limited, thus I prefer the train..