Boost Your Airmiles Discussion Area

ukdeebee

Well i honestly dont want to get in an argument with you but suffice to say you are very very wrong about the type of company this is (yes they do all get pensions AND private health care AND very regular staff training days and lots of fun company paid days out to the races and go-carting etc and yes we all go together its not a "boys day out" and we are proud members of the NASC and our company has a Corporate Citizen Award) why are you so quick to judge someone without knowing anything about them? And if there are any ladies out there who would like to become scaffolders then we would gladly welcome them with open arms and all our advertising clearly states this fact. However we did enjoy doing the recent parachute jump for charity with the lads and showing them how to do it without squealing like a baby!! Please dont judge me without knowing anything about me or my morals or what my company stands for. I asked a simple innocent question, i dont want to cut any corners or break any rules i just wondered if someone on these boards had a similar dilemma as i hated to think of all those points sitting in cyber space somewhere and not being utilized. Trust me you dont get any perks running your own business these days its incredibly tiring and thankless most of the time but if a few measly miles could have put a smile on my face then whats the harm!!! Please dont reply as i have no intentions of continuing to converse with someone so narrow minded and opinionated.

NonGeographicalMan

It seems I was perhaps unfairly judgemental. The rest of the employment policies of your firm all sound excellent. Also things like private medical insurance and/or permanent health insurance would be all especially desirable things to have in a trade where such nasty injuries can very occasionally befall an employee despite the best possible working practices being followed.

Also originally I thought you were a transport firm where lady drivers are a little more common. I would agree that even here down south in Surrey I have yet to come across my first lady scaffolder. And we have had quite a bit of scaffolding work on this building.

I can see what you are saying about the points going to waste. But all I am saying is that Shell really didn't set up the Drivers Club to make it easy to do what you have in mind. They and the other fuel companies all think in terms of company fuel cards that give a discount on the price of the fuel and track the mileage of drivers for that purpose. Having said that I actually had their own Shell Citi Mastercard for personal customers that gave me 3% off on fuel as a private purchaser and then they walked out on the deal after only a year a year or so ago.

Looking at what you want to do the miles are electronic and need to go a Drivers Club account with a name and address. Then periodically Shell transfer them to Air Miles to tally with that Air Miles customer's account. I suppose you may well be able to register 15 Shell Drivers cards with the same person's name at one address and then have them all clocking the miles over to your own Air Miles account. I just don't know as I haven't tried it. But I would say what you are trying to do may go against the spirit if not the letter of the Shell Drivers Club scheme.

Tesco did a lot of CDs in their Extra stores with huge numbers of Air Miles at £1 each bit there was meant to be a limit on how many you could buy. Some people bought hundreds of them due to the Air Miles you could earn. Eventually Air Miles refused to honour some of those conversions of Tesco Clubcard points to Air Miles. Especially when people tried to use them all during the double Clubcard points to Air Miles promotions 15 months ago.

Why not try and get yourself 10 or 15 drivers club cards (they give them out like Smarties at the till) and see if you can register them all to your own name and address. Even after that you will need to persuade your drivers to cooperate and I suppose at least some of them might think it was an odd think for you to expect them to do.

I leave it up to you as you might perhaps manage to make it work for you.

mobrien18

Hi Guys,

For anyone with a Lloyds TSB Duo Credit Card, you can get an extra 150 Airmiles on top of your usual Airmiles earned, when you spend £100 in Argos, or £200 in Currys.

This can be done in store, or online, so even more on top if done via the Airmiles e-store.

This is running until 30 April. Full details here:http://www.lloydstsb.com/credit_cards/duorewards/offers.asp

Hope this of some use to someone!

Savvy_Spender_South

Can anyone say from memory of airmiles offer double miles on Club Card promotions ever? kind of a cross over question between here and Tesco Club Card but with another voucher print just around the corner, and everyone now at 250 for 50, does anyone believe holding on to vouchers may be beneficial in the next 6 to 12 months as periodically there is a double miles weekend or such like?

ianvogler

|American express at Heathrow gave me 1 virgin mile for every one pound i spent with them last week .

So if you changed £2000.00 with them one day and sold it back the next you would get a lot of miles ! ok you would lose some on the rate , but is it worth it as a way of getting more miles ?

davelewis

Savvy_Spender_South wrote: »

Can anyone say from memory of airmiles offer double miles on Club Card promotions ever? kind of a cross over question between here and Tesco Club Card but with another voucher print just around the corner, and everyone now at 250 for 50, does anyone believe holding on to vouchers may be beneficial in the next 6 to 12 months as periodically there is a double miles weekend or such like?

I know last spring time they offered 120 airmiles for every £2.50 of clubcard you exchanged. This was for people who had never exchanged clubcard vouchers for airmiles before. We had never done this before so we exchanged ours and we managed to get 2 return flights to miami for approx £150 in clubcard vouchers and £330 cash.

The current rate of 50 airmiles for every £2.50 is dire and not worth doing in my opinion. We have always exchanged our clubcard vouchers in the past for Virgin holidays and we will go back to this for our next trip to Las Vegas.

Hope this helps.

NonGeographicalMan

davelewis wrote: »

The current rate of 50 airmiles for every £2.50 is dire and not worth doing in my opinion. We have always exchanged our clubcard vouchers in the past for Virgin holidays and we will go back to this for our next trip to Las Vegas.

In my opinion its only actually worth collecting the basically free Air Miles such as the 500 Air Miles recently gave you if you spent at leastt £300 on the Lloyds TSB Amex card in December and January (£300 in each month). Now normally I would use my Egg Money Mastercard and have picked up £6 cashback but seeing as how 560 Air Miles (500 extra plus the usual 60 for spending £600 on the Lloyds TSB Amex card) are roughly worth £56 (if that is you can find an available flight when you actually want to travel and to where you want to travel) I was prepared to be motivated to use my Lloyds TSB Amex card for those two months.

Similarly I now use my Shell Drivers Club card to collect Air Miles and not Shell petrol vouchers as the Shell petrol vouchers I collected were always a huge hassle to redeem (had to remember to use them when you were at the station before they expired and have them with you and had to use them in a separate transaction from any petrol paid for by the Shell Citi Mastercard) and this Shell petrol activity (I don't buy all my petrol at Shell but do use Shell when they have the cheapest petrol somewhere on my route) is my insurance that I will always collect some Air Miles each year and so not suffer the inactivity fee or losing them completely for lack of activity.

Other than that the rest of the time I use my Egg Money Mastercard in the UK to get 1% cashback and the my Nationwide Visa card in Europe outside the UK (a better deal as you avoid the 2.65% foreign exchange rate levy compared to other cards like the Egg Money card that only provides 1% cashback) as its really not worth going out of one's way to target extra Air Miles collection when they are so jolly hard to redeem on flights you might actually want to book.

As to Tesco Clubcard vouchers the best deal is on the 3 to 1 voucher promotions with Pizza Express, Eurotunnel, Irish Ferries etc but greatly tempered by the problem of vouchers expiring every two years and whether or not any of these deals are any use to you personally. Regarding the 20% reduction of the Tesco Clubcard to Air Miles conversion rate you should remember that Tesco are still giving double Clubcard points so as long as they do that then in effect each £2.50 voucher x2 (due to the double points) = 100 Air Miles on the old basis. Whereas many of the Clubcard vouchers people converted on the double Air Miles promotion were actually collected on the old £1 = 1 Tesco Clubcard point basis.

So actually you are now looking at 100 Air Miles for each £250 of Tesco spend compared to previously 60 Air Miles for each £2.50 of Tesco spend (apart from those used on the double Clubcard points conversion promotion where it was 120 miles for each £250 of Tesco spend). Similarly although you now only get 3 to 1 on your Clubcard points with Eurotunnel, Irish ferries etc instead of 4 to 1 previously as you collect double the number of points per £1 spent in effect its 6 to 1 compared to the old deal. The big problem however is those nasty little paper vouchers you can so easily lose and the 2 year Clubcard Points expiry rule. Both of these things are clearlyd deliberately done to cheat less diligent Tesco customers out of their Clubcard Points (in my opinion) compared to the straightforward but much less generous Nectar scheme where all points are electronic and are valid indefinitely.

Anyone who exchanges hard cash for either Air Miles or BA Miles (both schemes have been pushing this to customers recently at a supposedly improved rate which is still a very bad one) must in my opinion be positively certifiable unless there is only a very short gap indeed between the number of miles they hold and the miles needed for some long distance trip for several family members that they must take by a certain critical date (by which they will not have collected enough Miles the normal way).

Savvy_Spender_South

NonGeographicalMan wrote: »

In my opinion its only actually worth collecting the basically free Air Miles such as the 500 Air Miles recently gave you if you spent at leastt £300 on the Lloyds TSB Amex card in December and January (£300 in each month). Now normally I would use my Egg Money Mastercard and have picked up £6 cashback but seeing as how 560 Air Miles (500 extra plus the usual 60 for spending £600 on the Lloyds TSB Amex card) are roughly worth £56 (if that is you can find an available flight when you actually want to travel and to where you want to travel) I was prepared to be motivated to use my Lloyds TSB Amex card for those two months.

Thanks Non-Geo, as usual your numbers crunch well, all be it not the ideal answer some hope to see.

can i ask about the Lloyds TSB bonus you mention. Was this a specific promo you enlisted for? i know recently they did and Argos/curries special but you had to register before you spend.

I defiantly spent ober 300 a month Dec/Jan but was not aware of this bonus so i guess i missed out:mad:

NonGeographicalMan

Savvy_Spender_South wrote: »

can i ask about the Lloyds TSB bonus you mention. Was this a specific promo you enlisted for? i know recently they did and Argos/curries special but you had to register before you spend.

I definitely spent over 300 a month Dec/Jan but was not aware of this bonus so i guess i missed out:mad:

A good question.

What happened was that I received an email from Air Miles (not Llloyds TSB) some time in November telling me that in order to show their appreciation to loyal Air Miles collectors they were offering this 500 bonus Air Miles to anyone who spends £300 on the Lloyds Duo cards in both December and January (could be Amex or Mastercard I think but obviously you are going to use Amex if you can due to the better rate on regular mile accumulation) so £600 spend in total required (there were start and end dates during which the spend could occur but it was also split over two monthly statement cycles).

For whatever reasons that email has now vanished from my Inbox. I suspect I accidentally deleted it when I was clearing out junk. So I did begin to wonder in early February if I had imagined the whole thing but sure enough when I logged in to my Air Miles account in late February there were the extra 500 Air Miles from the promotion in one single credit. I don't now recall if you had to also register or not to get the extra miles as I don't recall doing so and the email has now sadly vanished. You did definitely have to register as well for a promotion that Shell was also running in December and January where if you filled up with 15 litres of fuel twice between set dates and had pre-registered they credited you with another 200 Shell Points. Hardly very exciting compared to the Lloyds Amex card as that is only 10 extra Air Miles but I suppose still a big uplift on the normal 1.5 Air Miles earned for two 15 litre fill ups at a Shell petrol station on regular Unleaded.

Regarding the Lloyds Duo card 500 bonus Air Miles I suspect that the promotion was not available to anyone who had received the 1500 bonus miles for opening a new card in the last 12 or 24 months or whatever and it instead seemed to be targeted at those us with an existing Lloyds Duo card pairing that we had held for some time to encourage us to go on using it. As I only spend about £500 per month on credit cards anyway I simply used the Lloyds Amex at any retailer that would take Amex (obviously not all of them do) and was able to reach the £300 spend required in both months, especially as one of them also involved Christmas present purchases. I still used my Egg Money Mastercard at retailers that didn't take Amex as I was confident I would hit the £300 per month spend target without needing to do so.

Savvy_Spender_South

Thanks for the response.

Agreed it was probably a loyalty bonus for existing customers. I got my AMEX in the last 1 2months purely for the 1500 into bonus and it worked. return for 2 to Amsterdam...check.

I am trying to convince a few work collegues to get one just for a free weekend away but some people really do doubt such a freebie could be genuine.

I have kept the card (zero balance obviously) for any specials they run, and mainy convert tesco points as i dont have a lot of use for them anywhere else. I will keep the card now just in case they run any more bonus offers like you experienced.