Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Earn up to 10,000 Avios with new hotel booking partner Kaligo

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Back in September I reported that hotel booking site Rocketmiles was now partnering with British Airways Executive Club to offer Avios points when you booked a hotel with them.

BA has just launched a new partnership along the same lines with Kaligo (www.kaligo.com). 

There is a very generous bonus of 3,000 – 10,000 Avios available with your first hotel booking.

Kaligo British Airways

Kaligo is a Singapore-based company which is already partnering with American Airlines, Air Asia, Asia Miles, Jet Privilege and US Airways Dividend Miles.  The new tie-up with Avios is their first partnership with a European airline.

Kaligo has an inventory of over 300,000 hotels worldwide predominantly in the 3-star to 5-star range.

As with Rocketmiles and Pointshound, the company is effectively rebating part of its commission to you in the form of Avios points.  You can earn up to 20 Avios points per £1 spent which is a very decent earnings rate.

Earn 3,000 – 10,000 Avios with your first booking

To celebrate their new partnership with Avios, Kaligo is offering 3,000 or 10,000 Avios with your first booking.  This is on top of the standard Avios points you would receive from them.

You will receive 3,000 Avios if your first booking is for £999 or less.  Bookings of over £1,000 will receive 10,000 bonus Avios.  If you booked a hotel which paid their highest rate of 20 Avios per £1, you would collect 30,000 Avios from a £1,000 booking.

As I noted when I wrote about Rocketmiles, the key to using third party booking services like Kaligo is to be smart. 

If you book a chain property, you will not receive points or stay credit in the hotels own loyalty scheme for your stay – although you would usually receive points on your incidental spend.  You may or not receive status benefits – Hilton is very good about giving you status benefits however you book, other chains less so.

You need to do a trade-off between any potential loss of hotel points and status benefits versus the Avios you will receive from Kaligo.  Given their generous 3,000 or 10,000 Avios incentive for your first booking – on top of their standard Avios earning – it seems to be worth giving them a trial.

Here are the rules for the 3,000 – 10,000 bonus Avios promotion:

You must register with Kaligo via this special sign-up page

You must make your first booking by 31 January 2015

Your stay can be for any date although you will not receive the Avios until after your stay

You can only earn the bonus once

I am due to have a chat with the CEO of Kaligo today and hope to run a short interview later in the week.

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (44)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Phillip says:
    25 Nov25 November 07:17

    What’s quite interesting is that the booking interface is identical to PointsHound.

    • Rob says:
      25 Nov25 November 08:32

      I imagine both use the same third party interface. I had the chance at one point to create a HFP-branded version of booking.com but I didn’t feel it fitted with the site.

      • Sebastian says:
        25 Nov25 November 12:32

        The (perhaps surprising) answer is that the interface is proprietary, however there’s a large amount of research on travel booking user experience in the public domain, which Pointshound, Rocketmiles and we at Kaligo have probably all tried to incorporate.

        Most of the principles are universal to e-commerce: make it easy, keep it clean, and avoid redundant fields / information. We want to make the experience hasslefree, so that customers can enjoy their hotels and their rewards.

  • tony says:
    25 Nov25 November 07:27

    How does the business model work, and have people been getting Rocketmiles to post OK?

    My concern is this is a bit of a risk as you’re paying a third party for a product that might not be used for some time. They then use this as cashflow for the business as presumably they don’y have to pay the hotel until a later date.

    (I subscribe to the ethos that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is…)

    • Phillip says:
      25 Nov25 November 07:40

      I haven’t used Rocketmiles but have been extremely pleased with PointsHound. All my miles have been posting within 2 weeks of check out. PointsHound also offer an extremely efficient check in service where they call up the hotel the day before arrival with any of special requests and confirm back (including full details of who they spoke to etc), which I find quite impressive. The system certainly works. As you say, with having to pay it all upfront, they have quite a bit of cash sitting around (or moving about depending on how they “invest it).

    • Paul says:
      25 Nov25 November 10:01

      I had similar concerns initially. I’ve used rocketmiles once and points hound for four bookings and all points posted very quickly. I also cancelled a points hound booking with no issues and was refunded quickly. Happy with both and would use both again. As long as you check prices etc they can work well. I had 3 windows open one for rocketmiles, one for points hound and one for kayak and made sure I wasn’t paying over the odds and room types were same etc.
      For the 5 hotel stays I made a little over 25,000 AA miles which was a nice boost to my balance.

  • Boi says:
    25 Nov25 November 07:38

    Would be interested to know if their prices are competitive and worldwide coverage. Hubby and I going to St Lucia in April and I know the 5 days will be over £1000.

  • What's the Point says:
    25 Nov25 November 07:58

    Tried a couple of test bookings and I think their might be some bugs to iron out – one booking claimed it was going to earn me 14,890,400 Avios for an 8 night stay!

    • Col A-B says:
      25 Nov25 November 14:12

      I may have beaten that 😉

      37,329,000 Avios earned for 10 nights at The Breezes Bail Resort & Spa. It does, however, cost £186,595 per night 🙁

      I guess they’re being fed some duff rates somewhere.

      • Sebastian says:
        25 Nov25 November 14:39

        You are absolutely correct, these are rates that have been incorrectly input by the supplier. We are working to put in place some guardrails to catch them automatically.

        I remember vividly the $1 first class air fares from Myanmar that were available across all major online travel agents a few years back. Lesson learned!

  • Tilly Grace says:
    25 Nov25 November 08:16

    Hi,

    I just checked that I can get 5700avios but as i use asiamiles more i tried that and it only offers 2700 asiamiles. Can you convert them easily over as they are both one world?

    Thanks

    • Rob says:
      25 Nov25 November 08:31

      No, you can’t convert them. You can use Asia Miles to book BA seats but you need to have enough Asia Miles to book it entirely.

  • Dale says:
    25 Nov25 November 08:21

    Please ask him to sort out the website. I’m ting to make a booking on an iPad but the website is driving me nuts! Keep getting logged out and search filters are frequently reset. I’m beginning to think the bonus Avios is not enough for the effort involved.

  • Paul says:
    25 Nov25 November 08:39

    Search engine does not seem to be working for me – tried to find a Heathrow hotel for 1 night in Jan and came up with no results.

  • Col A-B says:
    25 Nov25 November 08:49

    I’ll be interested to read how your chat with the CEO passes off.

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