e-Rewards

gavers79

Hi,

I know it's very hard to work out - but does anyone else here have e-Rewards? I have about 22,000 points and trying to work out what best to redeem them in:

Hilton Honor Points
Avios
Virgin Flying Club
or IHG Hotels

I use all the same equally so what like to take whatever I get most for?

Thanks

budgetflyer

Avios is for me the best value. You would get about 7500. Nearly enough for a RFS Zone 1 (9k)
Otherwise you could take a punt with IHG. I think you would get about 10K. Only really any use for 5k Point Break redemptions.
You can see which hotels participated in previous Point Break promotions at http://www.headforpoints.com/?s=point+break

Last autumn Crowne Plaza Limassol was a stick out for me.

The other 2 would only be of use to top up acc's

zerog

Do you have several e-rewards accounts? I was not aware that you could get hilton and IHG on the same account - I have 6 and only one of them has hilton, and two other ones have IHG

You can only redeem once per month to each programme (unless you have multiple accounts with the airline or hotel programme) - which means you'd take 3 or 4 months to convert 22000 e-rw to a single programme

Avios is not good value unless you have the Iberia option which gives you 3000 Av for 8000 e-rw. You can convert IB avios to BA avios after 90 days, if you are signing up for a new IB account. Virgin has the same poor rate as the BA and avios.com avios, but could be useful for little red redemptions. Through avios.com, you could theoretically get 750 Avios every month just for doing 1 survey, by signing up then deleting your account (though I wouldn't do this every month...)

Unlimited IHG points can be purchased for 0.7 US cents (so about 0.42p) each

1 avios is always redeemable for hotels at 0.58p, if you can't use them for flights

Best use of hilton is for points and cash awards, this tends to give around 0.33p per point. Paying cash for hiltons gives 4 types of cashback - tesco points via TCB, your credit card points/miles, and double dip hilton points and airline miles (or extra hilton points). These (except a proportion of the credit card points) are forfeited when redeeming, so the actual saving is a bit less than you might think

gavers79

Thanks guys all good stuff. I have a BA Avios credit card as it is and have 122K miles - need to start checking them in!!

Between IHG and Hilton on this, what offers the best value?

gav