Lisbon Flights

Because of a major ice and snow storm on the east coast of the United States, we were forced to fly from our hometown of Charlotte to MIami instead of to Philadelphia, which was our scheduled route. This change of plans would cause us to arrive late in Madrid, but better late than never!
Because of the inconvenience, we were upgraded on our Iberia flight (US Airways endorsed our ticket on Iberian, a Spanish carrier) to Business Class. The seats were much wider than Coach Class and they reclined to almost horizontal, which enabled me to get some good sleep. When we boarded, the flight attended immediately asked us, "Quiere un jerez?" (she wanted to know if we would like some sherry).
Of course, this was an offer we were not about to refuse, and the drinks and comfortable seats made for a great flight.
On our way to Lisbon, we also had a slight mishap when Pav's luggage was temporarily lost! Fortunately, there are many flights between Madrid and Lisbon each day and his bag arrived in a couple hours.

Lisbon's airport is the largest and by far the busiest in Portugal and offers connections all over Europe. I flew in on the Portuguese carrier, TAP Air Portugal. When you fly out of Lisbon, there is a tax that is charged, but it will be included in the price of the ticket.

This is a photo of the airport information booth in which you can get all kinds of information, including free street and metro maps and well as hotel and transportation info. The lady that was working when we arrived hooked us up with our hostel and it turned out great!

There are a couple of daily flights to the most important European cities. Lisbon, unfortuantely, is one of the most expensive destinations in Europe if you consider the average fares. “Aeroporto de Lisboa” is conveniently connected to the city by Aero-Bus #91 (every 20 minutes). The fare includes the day ticket for the public transport in Lisbon already!
The company “Carris” is managing buses and tramways and “Metropolitano” is offering a small but well enough underground system. Together that makes a very good network to discover the whole city. Fares are rather cheap but check the latest on the web because I only know the old Escudo-based ones. For the cable cars you also need the bus tickets. Please queue up at the bus stops or you will cause angry reactions by the Portuguese! Even if you don’t want to use the underground, just visit the very nice stations with magnificent painted tiles (azulejos) everywhere. On the page on the left you see the Elevador da Gloria.

If you arrive at apt just take the aero-bus to the city center: it's a 20 minutes ride.
This is really amazing by public transport: they're powerful, cheap and (especially the underground) quite reliable & safe (several policemen during late hours); the only problem with underground is that it closes at 1am so the nightlife could be hard ...

The tourismo(an association of different entities managing touristic aspects of Lisbon) can provide you with the so-called Lisboa-card which allows free entrance for some museums, hard-discount for others attractions and MOST IMPORTANT free access to the carris (the city transport system, more info @ www.carris.pt). This card has a time validity you can choose between 24, 48 & 72 hours ideally suited for weekend breaks (the 72 hours costs 22 euros).

Moving to the Bairro Alto (one of the upper parts of Lisbon) is ensured by funicolars (rallway) and elevators (very famous the Santa Justa one) both included in the Lisboa-card services.

In the pic: the funicolar ... by night.

You can reach Lisboa by airplane for example with TAP air portugal.

if you arrive by plane to Lisbon, just outside the airport catch aerobus to go to downtown.
costing 3.50 Euros but this ticket is valid for the full day

We flew in to the airport and got a reasonably priced taxi to our hotel. I think it was a round 12 Euros for the one way trip.

The service onboard was OK but the seat pitch is narrower than usually on airbuses!!