The Madeira trick: why you shouldn't fly there direct from Spain
I wanted to go to Madeira from Barcelona. Simple enough request — two well-connected places, three hours apart by air. The direct search result was so bad I assumed the data was broken: essentially no nonstop service, and the one direct fare that did surface was Binter at €730. One way.
The data wasn't broken. Barcelona to Funchal nonstop just barely exists as a route. Madeira's traffic is overwhelmingly Portuguese and northern-European; Spain, despite being next door, never built up direct capacity. When a route is that thin, the rare direct flight prices like a private shuttle — because for the airline, it basically is one.
The gateway split
Here's the play, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Madeira has two fire-hose connections to the mainland: Lisbon and Porto. TAP, easyJet and Ryanair pump multiple flights a day down those corridors, and competition keeps fares honest. So instead of asking "Barcelona to Funchal", ask two cheaper questions:
Leg one: Barcelona to Porto or Lisbon. This is one of the most competitive city pairs in Europe — Ryanair, Vueling, easyJet and TAP all fly it. Fares from around €20–40 if you're a bit flexible.
Leg two: Porto to Funchal or Lisbon to Funchal. As I write this, Porto–Funchal starts at €33 for August — peak summer, to an island.
Add it up: €25 + €33 is €58. Against the €730 direct fare, the gateway split saves you more than €500 each way. Even against a conventional one-stop itinerary sold as a single ticket (typically €180–300 in summer), you're saving €100+ and usually getting better flight times.
The honest trade-offs
This is a self-transfer, and self-transfers have teeth. You're on two separate tickets, so if the first flight is late, the second airline owes you nothing. Nobody through-checks your bag. And a cached calendar price on either leg can be stale by the time you click through.
So do it properly. Leave a real buffer — I want three hours minimum in Porto or Lisbon, and overnight is even better, because an evening in Porto is not exactly a punishment. Carry on your luggage if you can. Book the leg with the least frequency first (Funchal), then the flexible leg (Barcelona–Porto has a dozen daily options, it'll be fine). If the fare difference were €40 I'd tell you to skip the hassle and fly through a hub on one ticket — connections have their place — but at €500+ the maths shouts.
Why this generalises
Madeira is the cleanest example I know, but the pattern shows up anywhere an island or secondary city has one dominant mainland gateway: the direct fare from your city is scarce and expensive, while the gateway corridor is cheap and constant. The skill is noticing that a "city pair" is really a graph problem — the same mindset shift I bang on about in every airport is three airports.
Finding the split by hand means running several searches and cross-referencing calendars, which is exactly the tedium Flight Combinator's flexible-date search exists to remove: point it at each leg, let it sweep the month, and take the two cheapest days that line up. Twenty minutes of work, once. For a €500 saving, I'll take that trade every single time — and if your dates can move even a couple of days, the saving gets bigger still.