It is always fun posting trip reports from my Mum on here – I love travel and I love reading and writing about it. We both have trips to America in the summer booked under the Avios part-pay offer which will earn us 360 tier points – 240TP short of Silver. As she is retired and I have long school summer holidays, we decided that it would be nice to go away together. A trip to Rome in 2007 when my wife (girlfriend at the time) went to Hong Kong for a year was a great success.

I have had my eye on the LAN Madrid – Frankfurt flights for a while. They fly their 787 Dreamline from South America to Madrid and then on to Frankfurt, and you can book onto the last leg. Tickets in business class are relatively cheap, at about £80 each way, earning 40TP.

The LHR-MAD route is also an interesting one as it is serviced by a large range of aircraft. Get your timings right, and you can fly on wide bodied jets which feature fully flat business class sets, as opposed to the ‘economy-masquerading-as-business’ seats you find on the single aisle aircraft like the Airbus A319/320/320 and Boeing 737.

We have booked onto IB3179 from LHR at 1910 which should be on an Iberia A330-300.

Coming back we are on a BA 767, leaving at 1050. The map below, from Seatguru, shows where the best seats are – I would recommend the D/F pair as there is a seat spare in the middle – this doesn’t apply to the outer pairs.

All in all, this will net us about 4500 Avios each from the flights and a further 2800 Avios from booking the flights, which will pay for the positioning flights to Dublin where I will meet MummyAirmiles direct from Inverness. We will both get 240TP for our Silver renewal as well.

For hotels, we are staying in Crowne Plazas and InterContinentals, but more about them when we do a joint trip report!