‘I flew from Newcastle to London, via Spain, just to save £40’

Great chat at the pub can get you far. For 21-year-old student Joe Furness, it got him all the way to the Mediterranean – because it was cheaper than grabbing the train.

Rather than pay £78.50 to take a Virgin Trains East Coast service from Newcastle Central to London King’s Cross, he went online and saved £40.02 by booking a Thomas Cook flight to the Spanish island of Menorca and back to London.

Image: Joe Furness

The Tab spoke to Joe about how he’d arranged to go to London to meet mates for a night out. It was arranged “the night before whilst at the pub”, but the Marine Operations student found there were no advance rail tickets available.

Instead his journey, which would normally take 2 hours and 50 minutes, took “about a day in total”.

Once in Menorca, he hired a dark grey Seat Ibiza for £7.50 and drove for an hour to what he called “the most beautiful beach on the island”.

Joe’s route accidentally took him via celebrations for the festival of Sant Joan, an enormous annual fiesta featuring bonfires, dancing, music, fireworks, and horses – especially the horses.

Joe accidentally ran into celebrations for the festival of Sant Joan

Tragically, he did not join the party, only buying one Sex on the Beach cocktail for £4 in a plastic cup, because “I was driving”, he told The Tab. “Otherwise I’d have gone into double figures on the drinks”.

He then slept in the car. The following day he arrived in London in time to meet his mates, who, he says, “weren’t that surprised tbh, pleased it was my round though with the money I’d saved”.

Joe recorded the extravaganza and has published it on YouTube. He has previously flown from Newcastle to Manchester, which are 106 miles apart, via Geneva – a total distance of 1,321 miles – in order to save £26.

Joe enjoying a £4 cocktail

In a post on Facebook, he said: “I can have a night on a Spanish island, hire a car, have a cocktail on the beach, fly back to London and still have £40 left over….. OR: I could have sat on a train. What would you have rather done? #nationalisetherailways”.