Good Heathrow Rewards sign-up deal – 2,500 Avios, Virgin, Lufthansa, Etihad or Emirates miles

Heathrow Rewards – the loyalty scheme for Heathrow’s duty free shops – has launched a new sign-up promotional bonus in association with Etihad Guest.

This is one of the most generous sign-up deal that I have seen for Heathrow Rewards.  With this deal, you will receive 2,500 bonus points (= 2,500 Avios or miles) when you spend £150 in one day before 31st December 2017.

A smaller bonus of 1,000 points will be earned if you spend £75 in a single day this year – but you can only earn one bonus.

Heathrow Rewards gives you 1 point for every £1 spent in Heathrow (1 per £10 on foreign exchange) or on Heathrow Express tickets (online bookings only).  Heathrow Express bookings do count for points but unless you are spending £100 in one go it won’t help you trigger the bonus as you cannot control what date the transaction posts to your account.

You can redeem your 2,500 points for Avios (in either avios.com or British Airways Executive Club), Virgin Flying Club miles, Etihad Guest, Miles & More miles or Emirates Skywards miles.

If you’re lucky, you may even get a conversion bonus.  Lufthansa is offering a 100% bonus until 31st January, for example, and I took the opportunity to empty out my Heathrow Rewards balance to take advantage.

Alternatively, you could take £25 of Heathrow shopping vouchers or Heathrow Express vouchers, or £50 of vouchers towards the official Heathrow car parks.

Full details of the Heathrow Rewards scheme are here.  The offer itself appears on the Etihad website here.

Whilst Etihad is sponsoring this promotion, you are not obliged to send your bonus points to Etihad Guest. You can redeem for any of their airline partners or for something else.

Here is the small print:

The bonus points offer is available to new members of the Heathrow Rewards programme only who join using the above link or register their card and enter promo code EGAPR17 before 31 December 2017. 2,500 points will be awarded when £150 or more of qualifying expenditure is made OR 1,000 points will be awarded when £75 or more of qualifying expenditure is made in a single day 31 December 2017 and the Heathrow Rewards card is used. Only one offer per member. Offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other joining offer. Spend at any currency change will not qualify for this offer.

You may well already have a Heathrow Rewards account. If so, you have three options:

open an account for someone else who shares a BA or Avios household account with you, then transfer the Avios to that account

Heathrow Rewards now lets you transfer points between different people – you could get a card in a random name, spend £150 and then ring Heathrow Rewards to transfer the points to yourself

if you have only previously converted to one airline programme, you could open another account in your name (different email, different postal address) and then send the points over to Virgin, Etihad or Miles & More if you usually send them to Avios (or vice versa). Do not use the same Avios number on two accounts.

If your card does not arrive before your next Heathrow trip, don’t worry. Save your receipts and scan or post them to Heathrow Rewards and they will add them manually.