Boost Your Airmiles Discussion Area

cundall

you can always email them first via their online support.

phil7445

Geoff_W wrote: »

Does anyone know the address to send paper airmiles? I know they have to be sent by registered post, but I'm blowed if I can find out where to send them!

Geoff

It is on the Airmiles website in the Help section.

"Q: I have paper Airmiles vouchers. Are these still valid?
A: Yes. To add your paper Airmiles to your AIRMILES account please send them to:

AIRMILES Voucher Banking
PO Box 90
Birchwood
Warrington
WA3 7XA

Please enclose your AIRMILES membership number. Treat paper Airmiles like cash as they cannot be replaced if they are lost unless you can tell us the serial numbers and they have not already been spent.

Please note: We recommend that you send your paper Airmiles using recorded or special delivery. Bonus vouchers expired in 1995, please do not send in these to be added to your account. Shell Stickers are no longer valid"

ernie-money

rummy wrote: »

Ooops I just found it finally!!!!! Sorry for posting, I don't know how to delete

Hi, just wondering - what did you do to get the extra 50 miles...? Was going to get my OH to open an airmiles account and start collecting - would obvioulsy be much better if he could get 50 miles to start him off!
Thanks
Mia

cundall

ernie-money wrote: »

Hi, just wondering - what did you do to get the extra 50 miles...? Was going to get my OH to open an airmiles account and start collecting - would obvioulsy be much better if he could get 50 miles to start him off!
Thanks
Mia

You get 50 miles when you sign up an account (via a survey they send you).

kaneno1

I would like to take my family to Disney Paris using airmiles for the flights (probably October), unfortunately my airmile balance isn't quite up to this. I am considering applying for the TSB card for the 1500 mile voucher to make up the balance. My questions are
1. I'm aware that you must book a hotel through airmiles when using the voucher, does this include Disney hotels.
2. How do airmile prices compare with booking with Disney direct, including tickets etc.
3. Has anyone out there booked Disney with airmiles and if so how was it.
4. How long is the voucher valid

thanks

Gary

cundall

kaneno1 wrote: »

I would like to take my family to Disney Paris using airmiles for the flights (probably October), unfortunately my airmile balance isn't quite up to this. I am considering applying for the TSB card for the 1500 mile voucher to make up the balance. My questions are
1. I'm aware that you must book a hotel through airmiles when using the voucher, does this include Disney hotels.
2. How do airmile prices compare with booking with Disney direct, including tickets etc.
3. Has anyone out there booked Disney with airmiles and if so how was it.
4. How long is the voucher valid

thanks

Gary

Cannot answer all your questions...


2 Normally its cheaper to book direct but if you can get it for free with airmiles then its ok.

4 My voucher expires at the end of the year (i must leave before the end of the year).

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Promo at the moment you can win 10,000 miles via the link below:

http://www.airmiles.co.uk:80/content/generatePage.do?destination=trip+advisor+map+game

stuart.pinfold

There's a "new way to collect Airmiles" coming from the 11th May, according to the mailshot sent out this morning.

Any rumours or guesses as to what it might be?

I notice that since the eStore replaces the Online Shopping section, they have also removed the placeholders that used to say about getting Airmiles by spending on the high street and other ways which, to me, were never going to be launched because it would be difficult to make it happen!

cundall

stuart.pinfold wrote: »

There's a "new way to collect Airmiles" coming from the 11th May, according to the mailshot sent out this morning.

Any rumours or guesses as to what it might be?

I notice that since the eStore replaces the Online Shopping section, they have also removed the placeholders that used to say about getting Airmiles by spending on the high street and other ways which, to me, were never going to be launched because it would be difficult to make it happen!

Not got the mailshot yet... no idea what this could be but i am looking forward to this!

NonGeographicalMan

I have just sent the below email to Andrew Swaffield, the CEO of this increasingly dishonest mileage collection scheme (the new parent company - www.themileagecompany.com - also operates BA Miles under the same senior management team) and a variety of other relevant people including Willie Walsh (note the email addresses I used for Walsh and other BA executive board directors which do work - unlike *EMail Removed*, which gets bounced) with the last remaining straw from my point of view being Scam Miles dishonestly listing destinations in the Scottish Isles on Zone 1 (Stornoway, Kirkwall, Shetlands, Tiree and Islay) of their destinations map that are in reality unbookable on any date in the next 12 months and even worse their outrageous attempt to steal from me a total of around 11,000 miles that I have amassed on their rotten scheme in the last 20 years but taken only two one way flights with (in the days when one way flights were allowed). I collected far, far less miles with BA Miles but did at least manage one way flight with them from Gatwick to Palma as BA Miles redemption opportunities are a lot more plentiful and less restricted than those on Air Miles. Also BA are still not threatening to boot me out of BA Miles even though my balance as a Blue Executive Club Member is only 150 miles and has been only 150 Miles for over four years.

I would strongly advise anyone chasing the pot of fools gold at the end of the rainbow that is BA group Air Miles to stop colllecting them (other than the minimum required effort of say spending £10 on your Lloyds Amex card once every 12 months or redeeming one £2.50 Tesco Clubcard voucher every 12 months to stop the !!!!!!!s cheating you out of your miles altogether) and get a Cashback credit card like the Shell Citi Mastercard that gives 3% cash back the next month on Shell petrol purchases and 1% cash back next month for all other spend on the card (albeit only in the form of spend on Shell petrol next month but as petrol is so expensive I always manage to consume the cash back) .

My own intention is to take some flights in the next year to completely wipe out my current largeish (at least to me and especially when Scumbag Miles announced they planned to steal them from me) miles balance and then have nothing more to do with this totally dishonest and quite useless mileage collection scheme.:eek: :mad:

Needless to say they have not so far sent me the promised communication about their plans to steal my 11,000+ miles if I don't collect any more and when I logged in to my online account with them yesterday (for the first time in perhaps a year) they conveniently claimed my email address was defunct and so emailing to me suspended, even though I am receiving email from hundreds of other people to precisely the same email address with no problem at all. I presume that this will be the technique that the O'Leary of BA (aka Willie Walsh as this Andrew Swaffield character at Air Miles is clearly only an obedient BA Yes Man given that he formerly worked directly for BA for years) plans to use to steal my miles by claiming that they had repeatedly tried to contact people by email (that the customer had given as their preferred contact method) only to find there was no response...........

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Original Message

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Subject: No Availability All Year To Scottish Isles, Attempt To Defraud Longstanding Customers & Other Issues
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:27:40 +0100

To: *Emails removed*

Dear Mr Swaffield,

No Availability All Year To Scottish Isles, Plan To Defraud Longstanding Customers Out of Collected Air Miles & Other Issues - Air Miles account number 3081 XXX XXXX XXXX

I write as someone who has been collecting Air Miles with your company since it launched its collection activities in the UK in 1988. Of course like the vast majority of your customers I am only an ordinary modest collector of these Air Miles miles with a mere 9,937 miles currently on my online account and another 1,000 or so in the drawer in years old vouchers that your customer service apparatus previously told me not to bother sending in to Air Miles until I needed them but that you and your hard bitten corporatist colleagues on The Mileage Company Board have probably already long since cheated me out of when I wasn't paying attention. No doubt you were still hoping that you might have been able to also cheat me out of the other 9,937 online miles later on this year if I hadn't been paying close attention to the www.moneysavingexpert.com's website weekly newsletter (especially as logging on to my online account for the first time in ages today I see that you conveniently proclaimed my email address to now be inoperational, and in need of reactivation, even though it has been working perfectly fine for numerous other emails I still receive to that email address). It seems perfectly clear to me from the many disgraceful changes made to the Air Miles scheme over recent years that in the absence of an investigation by the Office of Fair Trading that you and your colleagues on the Board would have no scruples at all in trying to cheat me out of mileage worth between £700 and about £2000 in flights depending on how and when that mileage is used.

Like many of your longest standing collectors dating back to your relationship with NatWest Gold Plus and Shell Select I had stopped collecting any more Air Miles in the last two to three years precisely because of the many utterly dreadful changes that your company has made in the scheme in the last five years, almost totally against the interests of Air Miles collectors, that have caused me to regard them as largely a confidence trick where you and your colleagues in this wholly BA owned subsidiary apparently regard any long term Air Miles collector who has not redeemed any of them lately (there must be millions of us given how hard you deliberately make it in your rotten scheme to ever use the miles when you want to) as some kind of dozy fool who is now easily defrauded. As a result of this I prefer to now take all my loyalty scheme rewards where I have a choice in the form of hard cash and at the vanguard of that choice at the present time is my Shell Citi Mastercard on which I earn 3% cashback on Shell petrol in the UK and 1% on everything else I buy on the card. When I travel overseas I switch to using my Nationwide Credit and Debit Visa cards where at least until now I have not been subjected to the despicable 2.75% foreign exchange rate swindle that nearly all other issuers of Visa and Mastercard products in the UK (including Air Miles) established 7 or 8 years ago. Although I have Lloyds Duo Amex and Mastercards I never ever use them because they only collect more of a currency that I have come to regard as being near worthless in the last 5 years of the 21 years I have been collecting them - namely Air Miles. If Air Miles were truly a no cost option, because there was no cash alternative, I might still collect them but as there is a cash alternative and indeed incredibly the Tesco scheme relies on persuading people to give up hard cash for Air Miles then I have no interest at all in locking away cash in to a currency that the parent British Airways group is quite clearly intent on finding as many devious ways as possible of making as nearly worthless as possible as fast as possible. However with great reluctance I have just changed the loyalty reward on my Shell Drivers Club card back to Air Miles, instead of a further 0.5% to 1% (depending on how much fuel I buy each month) cash back on to my Shell City Mastercard but only so that you and your fellow directors are then deprived of the opportunity to try and surreptitiously cheat me out of my 11,000 or so Air Miles that I have painstakingly amassed over the last 20 or so years. In my book it would be called theft but in your book of big business corporate jingo speak I suppose you have invented politer words for stealing from customers learned from the same dictionary that Sir Fred Goodwin no doubt used.

So setting the scene my reason for writing to you now is to focus on one your of more blatant and brazen confidence tricks where under your new horrid customer cheating Zonal structure (quite blatantly designed to increase the mileage required to travel to many destinations at the lower mileage end of each mileage zone) I clearly find that in Zone 1 for 750 miles return I should be able to travel from a London airport to a wide range of Scottish Isles destinations including Kirkwall in the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Stornoway in the Western Isles, Tiree and Islay. All of these look like a good way to use Air Miles since the cash fares to fly to these destinations from London are generally pretty high and usually at least £200 return. Also as one attracted by the land of the north in mid summer (in 2004 I drove all the way from the UK across Scandinavia to the Nordkap at the top of Norway and then to the Russian border near Murmansk at Kirkenes) I was interested in visiting any of these Scottish Isle destinations (and especially the Orkney or Shetland Islands) near the summer solstice on June 21st, where in Shetland there is twilight all night at that time of year.

At this relatively short distance to the middle of June I was not completely surprised to find no availability with Air Miles to any of the Scottish Isle destinations and only cash fares on BA flights or FlyBe flights offered (I understand the BA flight numbers from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen are in fact perhaps code share numbers on FlyBe flights) by the Air Miles website but imagine my surprise when I tried dates in early May or in September, October or November or next January or February and carefully picking a wide selection of dates to all these Scottish Isle destination found no availability at all on any date at any time to these destinations. But as soon as I pick a route in Scotland served by BA itself such as Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen I find flights available on a wide variety of dates with no issue at all. I have discussed this with a number of your call centre staff at Air Miles today (including a sales manager called Sally as these call centre world people never ever reveal their last names) and while they were initially very reluctant to admit there could possibly be blanket unavailability to Scottish Isle destinations in Zone 1 after checking all the dates that I suggested they began to realise that I was right, even though call centre staff seem to inherently by inclination have very limited powers of logical analysis or lateral thinking deduction and even though Air Miles apparently runs no automated computerised real availability checks at all on routes offered by third party suppliers unless customers complain about lack of availability. My strong suspicion here is that there is either a major technical database error or that FlyBe is simply using the Air Miles agreement with BA as a marketing tool for selling its cash fares on these routes.

So as you can imagine finding most of the more attractive and exotic UK destinations (at least to a Southerner like myself) in Zone 1 offered by Air Miles unavailable at all times was a pretty disillusioning experience and only reinforced the impression I have developed over the last five years that Air Miles are nothing more than an elaborate confidence trick by the BA group. This is of course why The Mileage Company has chosen to make BA Miles its only worthwhile currency and why it split the scheme in two some years ago so that only buyers of expensive BA business tickets had a mileage currency which the parent group had any real interest in redeeming or maintaining the value of.

This latest utter scandal regarding a deliberate misleading price indication regarding phantom Scottish isle destinations in Zone 1 that are not actually available for miles but only for cash should perhaps not surprise me but even given the corporate duplicity that has developed to quite absurd levels at Air Miles over the years I was shocked at this quite brazen attempt to deceive your customers about the range of Zone 1 mile redemption opportunities that are open to them and would be interested to see the results of any high level investigation you now choose to launch in to the matter.

Turning to the wider issues of why I no longer collect Air Miles and will only do the minimum required to thwart the despicable attempts of you and your fellow board members to steal my 11,000 miles accumulated over 20 years from me my main issues are as follows:-

1. Abolition of Ability To Book One Way Flights To Make Air Miles A Second Rate Scheme Compared to BA Miles

The only flights I can ever recall managing to book with Air Miles were before the split with BA Miles and involved booking two one way flights from London to Genoa outbound and from Verona to London return so that I could go to the Imola Grand Prix over the weekend and also take in a brief trip to Venice before flying back from Verona. The availability of one way flights both increased the chances of getting a flight at all (as the booking was at the beginning of May) and in this case was also convenient as I saw Pisa and Florence at the start of the trip and Venice at the end of it, although I would have flown back from Venice and not Verona had there been availability from that airport.

I see no reason at all logically for Air Miles not to offer One Way flights as open jaw trips are particularly popular in North America and Australia and also handy in Europe on occasions as I have highlighted above. The only reason their availability is now denied to the Air Miles Peasants, in my view, is to pointedly tell Air Miles collectors that they are a second class species of being entitled to much less flexibility than business mile travelling collectors of your other main miles brand - BA Miles (which I am also enrolled in but have collected no miles on for years but for some reason BA shows much less enthusiasm for kicking me unceremoniously kicking me out of and which I did at least get one one way flight from LGW to PMI at peak season out of three or four years ago) .

2. Abolition of Club Class Travel at Low Winter Mileage Rates on Long Haul Routes Again To Make Air Miles An Inferior Downmarket Product Compared to BA Miles

Next at some point around 2003/2004 came your attempt to stop all Club class travel on BA Miles (especially long haul) on almost no notice causing very bad feeling amongst your customer base even though you later re-introduced Club flights but on far more disadvantageous terms for the West Coast of the USA under your horrid new zonal structure. I recall discussing this at length with a friend who I travelled on a companion ticket with from JFK to LHR on Concorde in October 2003 and who travelled a lot on business and who was an avid collector of Air Miles and BA Miles. His opinion was that this step by Air Miles on almost no notice was a quite deliberate attempt to defraud collectors in terms of the value which they previously attached to the miles collected and he was shocked that a BA owned company would behave in this Ryanairesque like way.

3. Absurd Introduction of Zonal Miles Structure In Place of Intelligent Variable Mileage Requirement According To Level Of Demand On Route

But by far the worst and most stupid step taken by you and the current team of directors (aside from abandoning the beautiful blue Air Miles exotic destination branding established over many years in place of the current horrid yellow and black 5 year old art imagery) was to abandon the intelligent improvement of the original fixed mileage scheme to each destination by setting the mileage according to to the season and remaining number of Air Miles seats left on the route (overcoming the main problem of the original scheme that popular summer destinations always completely sold out for Air Miles flights months ahead because they were far better value in cash terms at that time).

But because I suspect some freckle faced press on regardless 29 year old Air Miles marketing manager who presumably favours reading The Sun (a newspaper my sister worked for as a sub-editor for several years but which I still don't share the cultural aspirations of ) apparently thought that was "much too complicated mate" (even though it is precisely the system of demand related pricing so successfully used by Ryanair and Easyjet in cash form) we now have the hideous Zonal system, which makes popular summer destinations once again unavailable very quickly but makes Mediterranean and similar seasonal destinations very hard to sell in Off Peak season. So far as I can see the only reason it was done was to try and disguise a massive hike in the mileage required for all the destinations at the nearer end of each Zone to the UK in order to pay the cost of making Air Miles cover the fast spiralling out of control airport tax and passenger duty tax to bring the scheme back in to line with offerings from your main mileage competitors.

While perhaps in PR terms this had to be done in the short term to disguise the increase in average mileage rates to destinations I still see no long term commercial logic whatsoever in the Zonal mileage system with its inherent defect of massively overselling peak season flights (as they appear cheap in mileage terms) and under-selling half empty flights to summer sun destinations. In addition the zonal structure now massively over charges for all flights to North America compared to the cash cost of the same air tickets, although perhaps that for a while ceased to be true when the cost of a dollar of oil was over 100 dollars per barrel.

4. Outrageous Attempt To Defraud and Close Without Compensation The Inactive Accounts of Customers With A Lot of Miles Whilst Keeping Open Inactive Accounts of Customers With Less Than 500 Miles That Were Clearly The Non Cost Effective Ones That You Should Have Focused on Closing

But by far the largest and most outrageous own goal of all by your company has been the recent blatant and unashamed attempt to steal from the most long term collectors in your scheme just because you felt that their recent disillusionment with your scheme (no doubt caused by the many negative factors highlighted by myself above) that had led them to stop collecting meant you thought they were not paying attention and that you could therefore get away with it.

The pure brass necked nerve of a company within the BA group trying to adopt these kind of despicable O'Learyesque style business tactics really leaves me utterly speechless and I cannot think what was in the mind of your directors when they agreed to it.

Surely any rational analysis of the situation would have led to the conclusion that the only collectors with dormant Airmiles accounts that you might try to wipe off the system and that would not cause much negative reaction would be accounts dormant for at least 1 or 2 years that had balances of less than 500 miles. These were accounts that clearly did not have enough miles for a single return flight (although some collectors might have had large voucher mile balances sitting tucked away in drawers) and had a relatively high cost to maintain (although if you simply suspended postal marketing to these accounts until collection activity resumed the cost of maintenance would be negligible) but to try to wipe out the accounts of your most serious and committed historic collectors just because some sharp nosed accountant suggested this was a good way to eliminate a potential large balance sheet financial liability is really quite unbelievable. And surely any more sensible analysis of the situation would have led you to realise that these were the very people who historically actually really liked collecting Miles and that could be bought back in to the scheme if only you improved the range of collection opportunities and allowed more flexibility in booking such as restoring the right to book one way flights. These dormant accounts with a lot of miles therefore represented a huge opportunity for you to re-build your number of active collectors but instead you and your fellow directors for some reason thought you could cheat and swindle us by that stealing miles from your customers was not the same thing as stealing money in a bank account. The utter stupidity and naivety of this behaviour by a company linked with the BA brand is really quite beyond belief.

Summary

In summary as an Air Miles (your original brand and the original name of your company) collector of 21 years standing who has only taken the trouble to try to try to write to you once before some while ago (an attempt frustrated as I recall it by your use of non industry standard firstname_lastname email address format and non support of standard firstname.lastname email address aliases) the attempt of your company to pretend it has five different Air Mile Scottish Isle destinations available in Zone 1 to book, when in reality FlyBe seems to be using the Air Miles and BA flight number code share link purely in order to sell its cash flights (as there are no Air Miles flights available at all to any of these destinations any time in the next 12 months) represents the final straw in terms of the increasing duplicity and dishonesty with which I have come to associate the Air Miles brand and your Board of Directors during the last five or so years.

In the circumstances perhaps you would therefore be good enough to investigate the issues raised and come back to me on all of the various points in due course.

Yours in concern.

Regards

CraveBargains

NonGeographicalMan

I haven't read all your lengthy post but i thought it might be relevant to let you know that BA no longer operate the flights to the Scottish Islands. They are now operated by Flybe.