Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Bits: win 100,000 Virgin Atlantic miles, Monarch sale, a good family ski resort

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News in brief:

Win 100,000 Virgin Flying Club miles

I have written about the Virgin Red smartphone app before.  It is a new product which tries to bring together customers from various Virgin Group businesses and cross-sell them other products.

Today, it will be running a competition to win 100,000 Virgin Flying Club miles.  (It is a reverse auction, where you make a cash bid for the miles.  The person who places the lowest unique bid wins  (e.g. if 10 people each bid 1p, 2p and 3p but only one person bids 4p, that person wins – once they have paid their 4p).

Their is a £1 entry fee which I would have assumed went to a good cause but, it seems, does not!  It is up to you whether you think a chance of winning 100,000 Virgin miles is worth £1.

Virgin Atlantic 747

Monarch Airlines £33 flash sale

Monarch doesn’t get a huge amount of coverage on HfP but if you live in the regions it is a reliable option.  Their flights can, of course, be booked via avios.com using Avios points.  You can also redeem Tesco Clubcard vouchers for Monarch flight credit at 2 x face value.

Until midday on Friday, Monarch is selling 5,000 seat at £33 each way.  They are valid for departures from 9th – 23rd March, 12th – 29th April and 4th – 26th May.

Full details can be found here.

Monarch

A massive hotel upgrade I didn’t need

Our trip to the snow over half-term involved an overnight stay in the Sheraton Frankfurt Airport.  I reviewed the Sheraton at Frankfurt Airport a couple of years ago here so I won’t go into full detail again.

We did, this time, get the biggest upgrade I think I’ve ever had.  We booked two standard rooms on SPG points (10,000 points per night).  The hotel upgraded us to a 140 square metre, two bedroom suite.

This is the standard looking main bedroom:

Sher1

This the work and living area:

Sher3

And this, in a separate room, was the rather silly dining table for eight:

Sher2

There was also a small preparation area for food.

Unfortunately for us, we were only awake in the room for about 90 minutes.  The dining table was handy for a room service dinner for the whole family though!

Ellmauhof Hinterglemm

A good family ski resort

Whilst I don’t intend to review it, this is the hotel where we stayed in Austria, the Ellmauhof.

If you want to take your kids skiing, I thoroughly recommend it.  Under 5’s have a dedicated ski school at the hotel whilst older children can walk or be driven into Hinterglemm to the main ski school.  The hotel, as a member of Kinder Hotels, is fully geared up for kids of all ages and it worked well for adults too.

The swimming pool also has a fantastic water slide!

All of the front line staff speak English and it is a 90 minute taxi ride from Salzburg Airport.  Recommended.

Comments (69)

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

  • harry says:

    Not sure what do with another 100K virgins when I win, can’t get through the first 100K I have had for about 17 years now – just sitting there doing nothing

    remind me to buy something on the portal to get another 3 years

    • James says:

      Ill take those burdening miles off your hands! 😉

      • harry says:

        they were the result of me getting made redundant & losing the company Amex card & points 🙂

        I had to stick them somewhere, I had no idea back then so went for Virgin

    • mark2 says:

      you can transfer them to Hilton or IHG

  • harry says:

    OT another few offers hitting Amex a/c – nothing that interests me so far, eg Sunglass Hut £10 off £100

  • James says:

    It would sort of make sense to post your unique bid here once youve placed it.. No one is going to want to steal it and it lessens the chance of someone bidding what you did!

  • harry says:

    fwiw I think many if not most Austrian ski resorts & hotels are entirely family-friendly – it is a very family-friendly country. I’ve been around quite a lot of them

    the Hintertux area is excellent as they make sure there is always good skiing in winter (and even in the summer!)

    skiing in Austria is less punishing on the wallet than many people fear – food & drink en piste is usually fairly priced vs the likes of Val d’Isere, you can usually find cheap family-owned B&Bs even in the chic resorts, the ski passes are not exorbitant

    When I was younger, I did a lot of ‘drive up, ski the day, find a room for the night’ skiing trips & never failed to get by on a budget

  • Ian says:

    9 pm and cannot find it anywhere, a link would have been helpful

    • TimS says:

      Can’t find what? The Virgin Red reverse auction?

      If you open the Virgin Red app on your phone/pad then scroll through to “Get Low” you will see it.

    • Rob says:

      You can’t link to an app section!

  • Topp2015 says:

    £90-£100 taken FYI

    • Falula says:

      How do you know which bids have been taken????

      • TimS says:

        Because they (and 10 friends) have likely placed bids at those values.

        Other than that you can’t tell. That’s the whole point.

  • James says:

    Has the reverse auction for Virgin now closed? If so do we know the winning bid?

    • Corrine says:

      £4.00 was the winning bid. I bid £11 and thought I was hugely out as someone mentioned it needed to be £50 plus. Just goes to show any number can win 😉

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

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