Boost Your Airmiles Discussion Area

MaxedOutKev

Morning all,

I've just received my Lloyds TSB Duo Cards. I intend to go out and spend £10 to get the 500 airmiles deal, then pay it off immediately.

Just a question, how exactly do the miles get credited to you? Are they put into your airmiles account automatically?

Apologies, airmiles are completely new to me.

Regards.

imposter

MaxedOutKev wrote: »

Morning all,

I've just received my Lloyds TSB Duo Cards. I intend to go out and spend £10 to get the 500 airmiles deal, then pay it off immediately.

Just a question, how exactly do the miles get credited to you? Are they put into your airmiles account automatically?

Apologies, airmiles are completely new to me.

Regards.

They should be credited to your Airmiles account automatically, assuming you gave them your airmiles account number as part of the application process (it's been so long for me I can't remember), but it may take some time. Keep an eye on your account and chase up if they are not credited within, say, 4-6 weeks.

If you spend your £10 with your AMEX then you'll also get an extra 1 mile for that

roscoe3

Hi,

Over the last couple of years I've just been collecting my clubcard vouchers and not using them to the extent that I now have £160 in vouchers.
With some close to running out I am considering converting them all into Airmiles and found that my family (2 adults, 1 child and 1 infant) could travel to Spain for about £150 plus the £160 vouchers being converted into Airmiles.

However, on reading this thread (or at least part of it), it seems that it is not considered a very good deal!!

What are people's opinions of converting all my vouchers in Airmiles? Can anyone suggest better ways of using these? I've had a look at the rewards and I suppose the days out does appeal (with 2 kids) but not sure if much else does at the moment.

Grateful for any thoughts.

Cheers

NonGeographicalMan

roscoe3 wrote: »

With some close to running out I am considering converting them all into Airmiles and found that my family (2 adults, 1 child and 1 infant) could travel to Spain for about £150 plus the £160 vouchers being converted into Airmiles.

However, on reading this thread (or at least part of it), it seems that it is not considered a very good deal!!

Have you checked that flights are actually available on the dates you would want to travel with your family to Spain before converting your Tesco Clubcard points to Air Miles because on the whole availability with Air Miles to most destinations in the south of Europe is very poor for most of the main summer season. You should not work from the basis that just because Air Miles says a flight to Barcelona or Malaga is x number of miles that this means those flights are available when you actually want to travel.

Long haul with the exception of Australia the picture is much better and Air Miles seats are available for a significant number of dates even if not all dates and the best deal of all is booking late long haul with Air Miles where the cash fares are pushed right up but the part cash, part miles price remains just the same. But the question is do you ever have a reason to need to travel to Miami, Mombay or Tokyo in two days time or do you always holiday in Spain. If you want to fly to Spain then Air Miles usually do not usually work at all well to get flights to those destinations (especially bearing in mind that scheduled flights to sunshine destinations in Spain are primarily run these days by Easyjet, Ryanair and Monarch). Same thing with flights to the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland) or Western Isles (Stornoway) where despite being shown on the Air Miles Zone 1 route map flights to these airports are almost never available for most of the year.

It is a great shame that Air Miles cannot be used to upgrade a BA World Traveller ticket purchased for a cheap cash fare to Club as BA Miles can because to be honest that is the best deal on offer from https://www.the mileagecompany.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of the new BA/Iberia holding company) who run both the Air Miles and BA Miles schemes.

roscoe3

Thanks for this, some good info there. I didn't realise that availability would be so limited. Reminds me of the BMIBaby credit card fiasco a few years ago!!

NonGeographicalMan

roscoe3 wrote: »

Thanks for this, some good info there. I didn't realise that availability would be so limited. Reminds me of the BMIBaby credit card fiasco a few years ago!!

Aircraft fuel prices, government taxes and therefore total air fares have been rising sharply over the last few years and consequently so have cash fares to some destinations but the Air Miles rates have remained constant since the last rejig of the sceme three years or so ago where it became possible to avoid all taxes and fees by using Air Miles.

Until such time as Air Miles increase the number of miles required to fly to destinations (probably inevitable eventually) their solution has been to worsen availability so that only flights on dates on which the aircraft will now be hopelessly undersold on cash fares are now available.

Air Miles are very naughty about encouraging you to collect on the basis that all BA routes have flights available for Air Miles collectors only for people to find this is not the case when they try to book a flight. There are routes that are always available such as Heathrow to Aberdeen but this is because that route has a high level of walk on business from customers paying the full scheduled fare on the day so the flights always look undersold to the BA booking computer and hence some of those seats are offered for Air Miles.

Popular Short haul European routes where people book long in advance for family holidays by contrast seem to have no seat availability at all most of the time. There are still weird exceptions as availability on Gatwick to Marseilles is reasonable a lot of the time but there is almost no availability to Nice the majority of the time.

Most naughty of all has been Air Miles's recent unannounced cancellation of its contract this year with BA City Flyer so that there are no longer any seats available at all on BA branded and liveried flights out of London City run by their wholly owned subsidiary but there seems to be no sound basis for this decision other than a view that scummy leisure passengers should apparently not be allowed to clutter up the BA group's nice business class airport. :eek::mad::mad::mad:

You might want to check availability for any of the destinations you are thinking flying to on BA Miles at www.ba.com as well given that you have the opportunity to convert Tesco Clubcard points in to Air Miles or BA Miles. Availabilty is often somewhat better to many destinations for BA Miles but then you end up having to pay a lot of taxes and airport fees that you can completely avoid (but usually only at severe cost in terms of a bad conversion rate compared to a part miles/part cash deal) with Air Miles.

EDIT:- To further sway your thoughts BA Miles have just been running a short term promotion for a couple of weeks where the mileage rate to book flights to all their destinations was halved during the promotional period. This would obviously save a huge number of miles travelling long haul. By contrast the Air Miles brand of the The Mileage Company seems to have set its face almost completely against short term reduced mileage promotional rates during the last few years even though it did do a lot of them in the past before it completely altered the basis of the scheme and/or created BA Miles as a superior form of mileage currency.

stayathomedad_2

In the process of applying for duo card. When you fill in the application form there doesn't seem to be anywhere to request AMEX rather than Mastercard and nowhere to ask for second card for partner. At what point in the process does this happen and could I get stuck with mastercard instead of AMEX?

Loyalty_Rich

You will get both an AMEX and a Mastercard linked to the same account - I am not aware of it being possible to request one card or the other - if you're only interested in using the AMEX then just don't use the Mastercard. An additional card can be applied for but only once the account has been set up.

NonGeographicalMan

stayathomedad wrote: »

At what point in the process does this happen and could I get stuck with mastercard instead of AMEX?

You will either get both of these cards or neither of them issued to you. There is no possibility they will give you just the Mastercard and not the Amex card as the Amex card is the prime card on the account and the Mastercard is only there as backup to use at retailers that don't take Amex.

Toki

Airmiles is changing to Avios in November. More details here. Now have to pay taxes. Will have a read and see the downsides.

http://www.airmiles.co.uk/avios?from=homehero&banner=hmWelcomeAviosAcq&pers=false