A free night in Vienna COMPLETED About This Page:

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A free night in Vienna

Pre-trip report:

Dates: Saturday 19 – Sunday 20 March
Adventurers: Me, Cheryl (38) and DH Mark (45)
Destinations: Vienna, Austria
Meets: None planned
Celebration: enjoying a weekend away, thanks to a free night’s stay!

I love loyalty programmes. Someone wants to give me something for being loyal, then I’ll be loyal. As a result, it won’t surprise you to know that I’m a member of a number of loyalty programmes. Perhaps the best is still the Tesco Clubcard programme, which gives you points for everything you spend at Tesco. They’re now the UK’s biggest company, taking something like every £1 in £9 spent in the UK and for everything you buy with them, you get points that you can convert into prizes, things like vacations for example!

A couple of years ago, I decided that perhaps it was time to apply the same principle to the vacations we took. I figured out that if we chose an airline and a hotel chain to be loyal to, then we’d be rewarded for that loyalty and so it proved to be. We’re now loyalty members with both the Hilton group and the Holiday Inn group of hotels. Although we’re yet to get anything back from our Hilton membership, which we’ve held for less than a year, we’ve had some great benefits from being members of the Holiday Inn’s Priority Club.

One of their great offers that they run from time to time is the “stay two nights, get one free” deal. We put it to great use on our December 2009 trip, when we had two free nights to use that we spent in the Z Suites in Miami. Well, the offer came back again in late 2010. I knew that we’d have one free night to use up, with the stays we had planned and we knew what we were going to do with that – spend a weekend at Chessington World of Adventures to the west of London with our friends.

I didn’t expect to get a second free night, especially I wasn’t able to use the third booking I held for work. I had been due to cover an evening meeting, but that was right in the middle of the snow that we had at the start of December. I worked at home for four days and the meeting was cancelled, but I couldn’t cancel the hotel. Even if I did, it was completely non-refundable on the deal I’d got. I left it and was pleasantly surprised a few days later to get an e-mail, thanking me for my stay. Ok, so we’d stayed three nights then. One more night and we got a night free.

We had plans for a fourth night, just after Christmas, on the way back from visiting my parents, when we went to the Imperial War Museum Duxford. That stay duly completed, we had two free nights that both had to be used by the end of May 2011. That presented us with an interesting dilemma. We couldn’t use them for our planned fall trip to the States and Canada, so we’d have to find some other way to use them. Now there’s an interesting dilemma! Just to make it even more interesting, with a three week vacation planned for August/September 2011, a two and a half week vacation in April 2011 and a week in Egypt in January 2011, we were actually running out of vacation time to take, despite the fact that we have so much of it! So the challenge now was to find somewhere that we could visit in just a weekend with one night away....

Of course, it would’ve been far too easy to have found somewhere in the UK that we could’ve driven to. Now where’s the fun in that? We could do that anytime we liked. Instead, I started to do some research into where we could reasonably fly to in a weekend. Just like the States, where you have the likes of Southwest and JetBlue, we also have budget airlines and one of those is Easyjet. It’s the one we prefer to fly with, as the charges are more upfront than some of the others, shall we say.

I started looking into where they flew to from Gatwick, which is just half an hour’s drive away from us. I knew that they were the biggest operator at Gatwick by now, but I had no idea just how many places they flew to! I started to go through all the options, first reducing our choices to flights of three hours or less, as we didn’t want anymore than that for such a short trip.

Then I looked at the flight times, as obviously we wanted to get to wherever we were going on the Saturday morning and then fly back on the Sunday night, to give us maximum time in our chosen destination. That immediately saw a fair few places ruled out. The next part of the research was to check if there was a Holiday Inn hotel in those cities. In most cases, there was one, in which case the next thing was to have a look at their ratings on Trip Advisor. Some were then knocked on, especially if their ratings weren’t particularly great.


By the time I’d finished that fairly torturous process, I had a shortlist of:

• Hamburg, Germany
• Milan, Italy
• Nice, France
• Toulouse, France
• Vienna, Austria

We quickly ruled out both the French destinations, as we’d need a rental car to get around. For Nice, the only hotel was in Cannes, meaning a car would be essential, while for Toulouse, having visited the city last September, we’d be more interested in seeing the area outside of the city, which would mean a car.

Those deleted as options, we looked up information on the remaining three. Although Hamburg had the cheapest flights, somehow everything we read about the city just didn’t do much for us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s an amazing destination, but it wasn’t grabbing us, so that went as well. With the choices down to two, I did what any self respecting person would do and did a Google search “Milan vs. Vienna” and found someone else who’d asked the very same question. The answers gave me the answer I needed to know. Everyone who answered, almost without question, recommended Vienna of the two cities. Fine, that was the decision made for us!

I went ahead and booked our flights for Vienna, with the outgoing flight departing at 7.00am from Gatwick, arriving in Vienna just after 10.00am (don’t forget that continental Europe is an hour ahead of the UK, so you have to take that into account), with the return flight leaving at around 9.00pm and getting back in at about 10.00pm. It would allow us the best part of two days out there.

At almost the same time as I was booking our flights, I was also on the Holiday Inn site, sorting out our booking for our free night. I booked ourselves into the InterContinental Vienna, which seemed to be fairly near the main train station, which linked to the airport. Had we paid for this room, the website told me that we’d have paid €319 ($427). To me, that was great value, as the two rooms that we’d paid for to earn this free night had cost a total of £110 ($170). Not a bad return rate!

Once that was all booked, there wasn’t much I could do until the guidebook I’d ordered about Vienna arrived. unbelievably I booked a place that I didn’t have a guidebook for! When it finally made it, almost a week after I made the bookings I soon realised that in two days, we were only going to be able to scratch the surface of the city, there was just so much to see. That didn’t surprise me, as that’s really the case with any major city in the world. You’re never going to do it justice in two short days. : Think of Paris, London, New York or Washington DC and you’ll realise what I mean.

Instead, the logical approach seemed to be to draw up a shortlist of places that really shouldn’t be missed for a first timer’s visit to the city, so that’s what I did. It wasn’t actually a difficult task, as there were some obvious stand-outs:

1) The Spanish Riding School. Most people, I think, have heard of this place, which was originally established in 1572. The specially bred Lipizzaner stallions still perform regularly, although trust me, the performances are not cheap! : The top price of tickets is €130 ($174), so I quickly decided that we’d pass on that. I liked the idea of the morning exercises, even though you wouldn’t get to see all the steps that the horses do, but there weren’t any the weekend we went, so that wasn’t an option. A guided tour seemed like the best way to see the place instead, so that was that sorted.... although actually it wasn’t! Mark suggested that we really should go to see a performance, as it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity and he was right. I did a bit more research and discovered that the guided tour wasn’t very well rated at all, while the performances were. Ok, so maybe we’d do that after all then... We ended up going for the cheaper seats at €45 each. They’re on the first row up, looking down on the action and hopefully they’ll still be good seats...

2) Stephensdom. This is the city’s main cathedral, which has stood on this site for more than 800 years. It’s right in the centre of Vienna and looks like a stunning building. It’s free to enter and there’s plenty to see inside it. I’m really looking forward to seeing this, particularly as it was restored after the cathedral caught fire during bombing in the Second World War. It was meticulously restored, including its tiled roof – and from the photos in my guidebook, that can’t have been a quick job. :

3) Schonbrunn Palace and Gardens. This lies to the southwest of the city and was formerly a summer residence of the imperial family. It was finally completed in the 18th century and its grounds look huge on the maps I’ve seen, including a maze, fountains, a zoo and a palm house.

4) Hofburg Palace. This is really a complex and the Spanish Riding School is part of it, as are the state apartments and treasuries. They were used from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, until the fall of the monarchy in 1916. Shortly after this, the Hasburgs, the Royal family, were exiled and Austria was declared a republic. Bearing that in mind, I guess it’s surprising that Vienna’s still filled with so many Royal palaces, but thank goodness it is, for the visiting public!

Once those decisions were made, there wasn’t much more to do, although before our departure, I did book our transport into the city from the airport, using the train. The station was a short walk from our hotel, which was pretty useful. I figured that we’d buy subway tickets when we got there and saw what the weather was like.

On that subject, I started checking what the weather would be like on Accuweather from as far out as I could, and at times, I got a nasty shock! There was one day when the weather looked very nice on the Saturday, but then on the Saturday night and throughout the Sunday, snow was being forecast with temperatures in the 20s! Fortunately, as time went on, the temperatures improved and the snow disappeared, although it was replaced by rain. Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything! And heck, who knows what the weather will be like until you actually get there, right?

We’re also now booked for valet parking at Gatwick Airport. I did contemplate booking an airport hotel the night before our flight, but I quickly dismissed this, as we would barely have time to enjoy either the stay or breakfast the next morning. The problem was that to stay at the Hilton, you’d have to pay for the parking for two days and that could’ve easily hit £40 (about $55). At least if we’re at home, we should be able to set enough alarms to make sure we’re up and at ‘em early enough for our flight!

So those are our plans. We’ll be up and at ‘em bright and early on Saturday morning and home late on Sunday night. Hopefully I’ll have the startings of a trip report from next week sometime.