£300 US Biz Class Return on British Airways discussion

MSE_Jenny

This is the discussion to link on the back of Martin's blog. Please read the blog first, as this discussion follows it.

Read Martin's '£300 US Biz Class Return on British Airways' Blog.

Click reply to discuss below.

dmg24

Is the title not a tad misleading? It is actually £300 plus approx 50,000 BA miles.

Dizie

Good on you! Bring us back a stick of rock - do they do rock in NY?!

Look forward to seeing the new articles when they're up and running as am currently helping my parents do a "money makeover" and wonder if an airmiles card might be better for them.

Airwolf1

I use the MBNA Rewards card. I don't like these cashback ones that only offer it for a certain amount of time, although the Citibank one, in conjunction with Shell could save me a fortune in fuel expenses.

rlevy1950

This is not something I thought I would ever say about BA, but I too have had a brilliant trip using BAmiles accrued with Amex use. From an oridinary Blue British Airways American Express Card I spent £20k plus in one year when my daughter was getting married. This enitltled me to a companion ticket free. We had enough BAMiles saved to travel club to California. What a difference. The real price of the trip would have been over £2.5 thousand. I use amex for everything (All the big supermarkets take it) - and pay it off every month. I will not give them any interest.

I am now on the lookout for a card that gives me other freebies, travel insurance, breakdown cover etc. If anyone knows of one?????

kezzakkc

I'd been accumulating Clubcard points mainly because I refused to let Tesco get the benefit of them! With just over £400 available I was thinking of using them on a holiday with a Clubcard deals partner - trouble is the sort of holidays I fancied involved long-haul flights in 'steerage' and at 6'4" that's not a pleasant prospect! A friend told me tesco had now partnered up with BA Miles and this coincided with BA's 50% mileage promotion for business class.

So - on a Friday afternoon, having been told by both BA and Tesco that the conversion from Clubcard Points to BA Miles should be pretty much instant, I submitted all my voucher codes online at Tesco's web site. On Saturday morning I was told that nothing would happen until the Monday because the high value meant the transfer had to be manually approved. On Monday tesco told me the transfer had taken place but BA kept insisting it could take up to 28 days to appear on their system! This would, of course, have ruled out benefitting from the time-limited 50% BA deal!! However, the BA miles appeared the following morning (which is what I figured would happen based on my knowledge of IT and the way these things should work) and I then set about booking myself a roundtrip business class flight to Sydney for 100,000 miles.

In the end I paid around £450 taxes and fuel surcharges and the face value of the points was around £420 so I guess I got a business flight to Sydney and back (and I could have booked a stopover in Singapore if I'd wished) for under £900 - not bad going

:T

The only drawback I found was the sparse availability of seats - I wanted to travel in February/March but there was no availablity - I could have flown on 1st January (2009) but wouldn't have been able to return until April!! The first available flights weren't until June (Winter in Oz) and to travel in November 2009 meant flying out on 10-Nov and returning on 11-Nov as they weren't booking any further forward than that!! In the end I settled for a 3 week trip in September.

I like the idea of the BA Amex card as I spend a lot each month on business expenses which are always paid in full so I'm going to investigate that one!!!

meester

dmg24 wrote: »

Is the title not a tad misleading? It is actually £300 plus approx 50,000 BA miles.

EXTREMELY misleading I'd say.

At Tesco, 600 miles costs £2.50 of vouchers. Or £10 in other deals

So had he bought in Tesco vouchers he would have sacrificed approx £833 worth of deals.

Still a good deal, but no way it's £300

Another way of looking at it is, how much spending did this 50,000 miles cost?
And what's the best he could have got on another card as true 'cash' back. That is the true cost. He gave up some % on his spending in order to get these flights (not sure what that is, I don't keep track, as I'm happy with my (now withdrawn) Tesco card that pays an effective 2% in the form of deals).

JCB_Digger

I used to use my personal credit card (a cashback Goldfish) for all my company spend - it was great because I got the cashback, but I also did my paperwork at the end of the month as otherwise I wouldn't get my money back off the company.

All went well until the Taxman came and noticed that the bills/receipts the company was trying to reclaim the VAT for weren't in the companies name, but in mine.

We got away with it then, but were warned not to let this happen again.

Regards, John

sdooley

do you have to pay tax on the benefit derived from your job by using the points scheme from work expenses?

meester

BTW, which card does Martin have?

Is it the £150 'Premium Plus' card? (For which 50k points would be £33,333 of spending - equivalent to £650 on a Amex platinum card (when you figure in the £150 fee))

For £33,333 of spending on my Tesco card, I get £166.66 worth of deals vouchers, which buys 40,000 miles from Tesco - but I don't pay the £150 fee.

Comparing apples with apples, free Amex card with free Tesco card, the ratios are:

£500 spent with Amex = 500 miles
£500 spent = 1 Tesco reward voucher = 600 reward miles

So the Tesco card is 20% better, and far more versatile - for instance a couple of years ago I bought my wife a £1000 watch from Goldsmiths using the vouchers.

If you compare the free and non-free Amex BA cards, then if you figure the worth of the miles as about 1.67p (based on otherwise £10 Tesco deals value divided by 600) each, then the cut-off point to make it worth paying the fee is £18,000 of spending per year. And to make it better than the Tesco card - purely at collecting BA miles - you need to spend at least £30k a year. Even so, I'd say you need to spend rather more than that, because the flexibility of Tesco points is worth a lot, and BA miles could easily by substantially devalued at any point in the future.

All hail Tesco!

MSE_Martin

Hi Meester - all good but you're forgetting the companion voucher from Amex spend