Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Bits: get 25% off a Priority Pass, an Avios-earning Finnair sale

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News in brief:

Get 25% off a Priority Pass airport lounge card

To celebrate its 25% anniversary, Priority Pass is offering 25% off its airport lounge access cards for a limited period.

If both you and your partner travel heavily, you’d get a better overall deal by paying £450 for American Express Platinum which comes with two Priority Pass cards, each of which gives you a free guest as well.  This means a family of four can get into a lounge.

For more occasional travellers, buying a pass outright may make sense.  There are various combinations of upfront fee vs on-going cost per visit, although oddly you cannot buy a card which does what the Amex Plat card does, ie unlimited access for you and a guest.

Priority Pass cards start at £51 in the sale, although most people would find the ‘£127 with 10 free visits’ version better value.  Details of the various options are here.

Finnair A350

Good Asia sale on Finnair

Finnair has launched its Summer sale.

There are special Business Class fares to Asia from the UK via Helsinki, valid until 20th June 2017 for travel between 1st September 2017 and 31st March 2018 (dates vary by route).

What makes this sale attractive is that:

you can start from London, Manchester and Edinburgh

Finnair flights earn Avios and British Airways tier points

Finnair is flying brand a new A350 aircraft on many routes with excellent business class seats

Compared to the Club World seat the 1-2-1 configuration is a major improvement. You can read Rob’s review of the new Finnair A350 business class seat here.

During the sale a return flight to Shanghai in Business Class starts at £1,428 (not bad for a flight starting in London) and return flights to Tokyo start at £2,505 (a bit toppy).

Click here to see the prices out of London, Edinburgh and Manchester in both business and economy class.


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.

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.

Comments (46)

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

  • Dave H says:

    Free stopover (up to 5 days) each way available in Helsinki as well

    • John says:

      … which on outbound also cuts the APD from £150 to £26 minus cost of hotel (but in summer you don’t need to sleep since it doesn’t get dark 🙂 )

  • Dk says:

    Hi, do you know if the discount works in combo with groupon discount code?

    • Genghis says:

      FYI TRH1, that trick didn’t work for me on hotels.com but will be sure to keep trying it on other purchases going forward. Cheers

      • flyforfun says:

        It worked with me when PP had one of it’s regular 25% off promotions. Reduced the price of a visit to around £11

  • Genghis says:

    OT. 5k IHGs have posted for renewing AMB as part of Accelerate Summer. But I’ve not yet renewed AMB, which is due end of Aug. Anyone else have a similar experience? What might have happened?

    • SteveB says:

      Not seen this on mine. That said, my Accelerate dashboard is showing that I have recently made a redemption which triggered one of my targets, but oddly I haven’t (my last redemption was in March for an IC stay this December). As usual I think there are some bugs in their system.

    • CV3V says:

      i got the 5K, posted on 26 May, but i did renew AMB a few weeks ago. I like having AMB, seems to be cost neutral….

      • Genghis says:

        I agree. I was going to renew anyway. Thinking of using the voucher in Porto in Spring next year, but now waiting for EZY flights to become available.

        • RussellH says:

          IC in Porto highly recommended. Porto itself also highly recommended.

    • Kinkell says:

      I renewed my AMB just a couple of weeks before the accelerate targets were announced. One of my targets is to ‘renew my AMB status ‘. so I won’t be able to achieve the target, or bonus for completing 4 out 5 targets. Anyone else caught like this? Do you think IhG would look favourably ? Think I might contact them and see.
      BTW just had very nice stay at IC Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. As ambassador, got all the benefits, so a very nice end to our fantastic American road trip

      • Alex W says:

        I think others have contacted IHG saying they’ve already renewed and they have credited the points.

      • Alex W says:

        I think others have contacted IHG saying they’ve already renewed and they have credited the points.

  • Graeme says:

    O/T first batch of IHG accelerate points have hit my account today. Just to note that the accelerate dashboard is not giving a true reflection of progress i.e. Points for one target have posted to my account but not showing as achieved or in the x of x points earned. Sure this happened last time too.

    • GK says:

      Yes, I have targets I know I’ve completed, but not showing up on dashboard, whilst others have.. will wait until end June then maybe try to get it fixed..

  • Gavin says:

    Excellent pricing to ICN

    • John says:

      When? Can’t find anything under £1700. Got ICN for £1200 last year.

      • Gavin says:

        Just looked at the headline price, which is cheap compared to ex EU prices I’ve seen of late

        • Bob6 says:

          Was recently at ICN and noticed Finnair flight was an A330 – don’t know if there is any/much difference between their A350 and A330 J seat?

  • PalCsaky says:

    Marriott priority pass offer is better as it’s for 15 month membership.

  • Gavin says:

    Yes, after a new TV this weekend so triple avios will be nice

  • TripRep says:

    O/T: looks like BA’s FLY system has folded, loops on a Bank Holiday wknd too.

    All flights cancelled til 6pm today

    EU261/2004 lawyers will be rubbing their hands…

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40069865

    • CV3V says:

      Yeah, i thought i would i would come on HfP to find out what the issue is rather than try the BBC or BA!

      • Peter K says:

        Various news sources say it has been hacked/cyber attack or that lightning caused it.
        No officially word yet however and it seems that is going to be the biggest download downfall for BA. People can put up with somewhere being hacked as no-where seems safe, but they get really angry when they are told nothing!

        • Lady London says:

          I’d say it’s probably BA’s own IT failure. Based on my experience with their website. Must be very tempting for BA to explain it as ‘Act of God’ or a cyberattack though.

          • TripRep says:

            Expect it will run into the millions.. Even more if BA informed pax of their rights to claim under EU261/2004

            I bet they will be tempted to let that one sit for months before a dedicated pax goes all the way to ensure its tested in court…

        • Rob says:

          These people clearly dont know how many times FLY has fallen over since launch, just never this bad.

          • Alan says:

            This does seem to have been a particularly impressive systems failure – surprised they didn’t have better redundancies in place.

            At least the upside to working this weekend is not trying to fly anywhere!

          • CV3V says:

            As Alan mentions, surprising they don’t have an emergency backup procedure that could be used. Cant even work for some clients these days without proof of an emergency backup procedure.

          • Alan says:

            I suspect it may be more a case of what BA is willing to pay. Interesting post on FT that says “I spoke to an IT engineer at FLY last time the system went down and he said BA just won’t pay for more data storage/processing and everything is running to max capacity already..so I’m not surprised.”

          • Ro says:

            It’s like how the government didn’t want to update NHS computers from windows XP even when Microsoft said they were withdrawing support.

            It’s only until there’s a major meltdown will they learn their lesson.

          • Ro says:

            And it seems like they are making people stuck on the tarmac pay for refreshments. Wow great service BA…. that’s one way to improve the BoB statistics 😉

          • the real harry1 says:

            it’s completely pathetic, hard luck to the people hurt

            BA IT is rubbish

            better be sorted by Tuesday (wife)

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

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