GCSE Spanish Vocabulary: Travel and Tourism

All the papers of the reformed GCSE in Spanish (first exams in 2026) are written from a defined vocabulary list of about 1,200 word families at Foundation tier and a further 500 at Higher tier. Travel and tourism is one of the richest topics on that list and one of the most frequent in the exam: a reading text about a holiday that went wrong, a listening extract at a station, a role-play booking a room, a photo of tourists, a writing task about your ideal trip. This material covers the topic Travel and tourism, including places of interest, part of the third theme, Communication and the world around us, in the structure used, for example, by AQA; other boards place it under their own topic headings.

The quiz tests each word inside a short Spanish sentence: missing a flight, booking a room with a sea view, leaving a suitcase on the train, buying tickets, a delayed train, cheap accommodation, a view from the mountain, asking for a map of the town, getting sunburnt, getting lost and going abroad. It also asks you to pick the word for station from a group of travel words. The explanations separate words that are easy to confuse, such as el billete (for transport) and la entrada (for a museum or concert), la vista and la visita, and perder and perderse.

The twenty-four flashcards give the Spanish, with its article, and the English: holidays and trips, plane, flight, airport, train and station, tickets, suitcases, accommodation, booking, rooms and campsites, coast, sea, beach and mountains, views and maps, tourists and visits, going abroad, delays, getting lost and sunburnt, and the weather. Words that belong only to the Higher-tier list are marked.

The written sheet practises the vocabulary actively: recall in both directions, a translation each way, a gap-fill, a paragraph about a real holiday in the past tenses and one about your ideal holiday in the conditional, and an explanation of three pairs of easily confused words. The model answers show a correct version and the points a marker looks for.

Learn the cards both ways, then use the quiz to check you recognise the words in context, and finish with the two paragraphs, which are exactly the kind of answer a travel photo card or writing task asks for.

• Recognise and use the GCSE Spanish vocabulary for holidays, transport and accommodation
• Distinguish billete and entrada, vista and visita, perder and perderse
• Describe a past holiday with the preterite and imperfect, including a problem
• Describe an ideal holiday with the conditional
• Understand travel vocabulary in the context of a sentence

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE GCSE modern foreign languages subject content (2022) and on the Theme 3 topic Travel and tourism and the Spanish vocabulary list in AQA's GCSE Spanish specification (8692, version 1.0, Appendix 2), used here as an example. The sentences are original.