There is nothing more frustrating than finding that your miles have expired when you finally come to use them or add to them. This is most likely to happen with secondary programmes where you once dropped a few miles from a one-off promotion and then forgot about them.

As View from the Wing states, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic miles expire after 36 months of inactivity. It is very unlikely that an active collector would be caught out by such a long time frame. You can also reset the clock with a simple action such as buying 1,000 miles, doing a Membership Rewards transfer or doing a transaction via the Avios e-store or the Virgin equivalent.

One to keep an eye on, though, is British Airways On Business. On Business is the scheme for small businesses (or even one-man bands) which earns points for your company on cash ticket purchases. This is on top of the Avios points earned by the traveller.

I wrote an introduction to OnBusiness here and here. The key is that On Business points expire after 3 years whether or not you have other activity. If I take a flight today, those points will expire on 31st December 2016 unless I spend them, and nothing can stop that expiry.

Heathrow Rewards used to have a similar rule when it was BAA WorldPoints - your points would expire after 3 years, whatever you did.  Under the new Heathrow Rewards scheme, your points only expire after 3 years of no activity.  This effectively means that they will last forever as long as you buy a newspaper at Heathrow once every 36 months!

Lufthansa Miles & More also works the same way. Your miles expire 36 months from being earned, whatever other activity you have in the meantime. This is one downside of using Miles & More as your default Star Alliance programme, since it is very possible – if you only credit a few Star Alliance flights a year – that your miles may start expiring before you have built up enough for a decent redemption.

There are two ways of stopping your Miles & More miles expiring, though. One is to get status in the programme, and the other is to get the UK Miles & More credit card and use it each month. This will stop your miles from being wiped out.

Perhaps the worst of the Western European FF schemes, though, is Flying Blue, the Air France / KLM programme. Unless you have status, you need to take a revenue flight with Air France, KLM or one of their partners every 20 months or you lose your miles – whatever other activity you may have had in the meantime!  And as I wrote about recently, Air France’s UK subsidiary, CityJet, no longer counts their cheapest tickets as qualifying flights for the puposes of resetting the 20 month counter.

One way of tracking expiry dates is by using AwardWallet to monitor your miles and points balances (click for my review). If you pay for the premium version (any amount is OK, even a couple of $) it will show you the expiry date of your miles alongside your total.

The key takeaway, then, is to keep on the ball. You don’t want your hard earned miles to disappear in a puff of smoke.

PS. If you recently applied for the American Airlines credit card with the 35,000 mile sign-up bonus, then take clear note of AA’s expiry policy. Your miles disappear after just 18 months of no activity. If you have no immediate plans for the miles and intend to cancel the credit card, make sure you transfer a few hotel points to AA or credit a BA flight to AA every so often in order to keep them alive.

Full details can be found here.

Now, at this stage it is not entirely clear what is going to be offered.  Starwood wants you to link your Facebook account to your SPG account.  It is then promising to send you targeted hotel information based on the travel plans it can identify from your FB postings.

Whilst this is still a beta product, there are hints that Starwood will make special promotions available to members of SPG Social.  You may therefore want to give it a go and sign-up – or you may decide that you don’t want SPG invading your privacy!

Head for Points is partially funded through the commission we receive from readers who use the links to our affiliates.

Our affiliate partners – whose logos you will see in the right hand margin, half way down – are Amazon, InterContinental Hotels Group (InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza etc), ebay and Hilton. Clicking on those logos (or indeed the highlighted links in this post) will take you through to the relevant site.

Our aim at Head for Points is to always offer you the best value deal in every circumstance, so none of our partners are widely available on cashback sites.

Amazon

Amazon is not generally available on UK cashback sites such as Quidco or the Avios e-store, so you will not be losing out by using our links.  (Some minor categories of Amazon products are now available on Quidco, but none of the popular ones – certainly none you are likely to be using.)  With Amazon, we receive a commission on all orders placed through the UK site.  This includes the purchase of Amazon gift certificates.

Hilton

Hilton is not available on Quidco or the Avios e-store.  However, Hilton is now available on TopCashBack – but you can only take your reward as Clubcard points, not cash!  If you are UK based and collect Clubcard points, this is clearly a better result for you than using my link.

With Hilton, we receive a commission on any hotel booked worldwide, excluding North America, when not booked under a corporate rate.  (Hilton will soon start paying commission on North American hotels – I will let you know when this starts.)  The Hilton group includes Hilton, Hampton by Hilton, Conrad and Waldorf-Astoria hotels.

Crowne Plaza / Holiday Inn / InterContinental

InterContinental Hotels Group is not available on UK cashback sites such as Quidco or the Avios e-store.  You can use our link to book stays at Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, InterContinental, Hotel Indigo, Candlewood Suites and Staybridge Suites hotels.  We receive a commission on all bookings, wherever in the world you stay.

ebay

The ebay link works slightly differently to our other links. Head for Points receives a small payment whenever you visit ebay.co.uk via our link. It does not matter whether you are listing an item, buying an item or placing a bid. Please consider using our link as your starting point whenever you visit ebay, whether buying, selling or browsing.

You can still receive Nectar points when buying items on ebay, as long as your Nectar number is in your ebay account. You no longer need to click-through from the Nectar website to receive points from ebay – so nothing stops you clicking through from Head for Points instead!

TopCashBack

I also have a referral link to cashback site TopCashBack. This is an exciting new way of collecting Avios or Flying Club miles, as you can now choose to have your cashback sent to Tesco Clubcard, from where you can convert it into miles. More information on TopCashBack can be found here.

I am genuinely grateful to all readers who use our affiliate links and help support the site.

(PS.  We use Affiliate Window for most of our affiliate links.  If you run your own website and want to add similar links, you can find out more here.)

The link is here.  The short version is heathrow.com/rewards and not rewards.heathrow.com, despite what my link shows.

Very little has changed so far.

Here is what I spotted:

Some of the more eclectic rewards (eg discounted Business Traveller subscriptions) have gone

The minimum conversion for all airline miles (Miles & More, Virgin, Avios, British Airways) has reduced to 250 points which gets you 250 miles.  Virgin and Miles & More previously had a 500 points minimum.

You can now transfer Heathrow Rewards points from one person to another.  See point 7 of the rules here.  You can make up to four transfers per year.

The wording on sharing a card between a family seems to have been tightened up and in theory you cannot now do this (which is probably why transfers are now allowed).  It remains to be seen if I will have problems using my wifes card, which I normally do.

The website does not auto-fill the first 8 digits of your card number, which makes it a lot harder to memorise!  However, if you log-in and go to ‘Update My Details’ you can tick a box to make your log-in ID your email address.

Members will receive 90 minutes of free Wi-Fi in Heathrow, compared to the 45 minutes of free Wi-Fi available to the public.

Did I miss anything new?  Please post below.  Presumably new cards will be dropping through letterboxes in the coming days.

So far, no juicy sign-up bonuses have appeared, but I would expect something soon.

To be honest, it was written as a bit of fun.  And the fact that the ‘free postage’ code I gave had expired before the post actually appeared did not help!

However, a new code for free postage is now available – OLDNPP

At worst, you can now buy £50 of 50p coins for £50 and get them delivered to your house for free.  Because the Royal Mint takes Visa and MasterCard, you can earn a few miles for your effort and get £50 nearer any sign-up bonus you are working towards.

It gets more interesting if you buy 3V Virtual Visa cards from Tesco, though.  The Royal Mint takes these cards, so you can immediately cash them out – whilst netting yourself 150 Clubcard points (360 Avios) for every £50 of 3V cards you bought.  (See here for more details on 3V).

Since you are limited to roughly £50 per order - you can only buy 4 of each different coin - and since someone needs to be at home to take the delivery (I assume they don’t go through your letterbox), I still put this in the ‘bit of fun’ category.  But it could prove useful nonetheless.

Whilst Gatwick is not full, there is a shortage of good slots at peak times.  easyJet presumably sees this as a good way of expanding further at the airport.  Flybe gets a chunk of cash to help pay of its debts.

This is a pattern we have seen before at Heathrow.  As airports get fuller, the only way to increase passenger numbers (to get more duty free sales!) is for airlines to operate larger planes.  You do this by adjusting the landing charges so they become more of a flat fee rather than a ‘per passenger’ number, which makes Flybe’s smaller planes uneconomic to operate.

As this BBC article points out, there are concerns over the future of some Flybe services, especially to Scotland and Jersey.  The cheap BA flights to Jersey from Gatwick will certainly see price hikes if easyJet does not take over the route.

Nothing will happen until March 2014, though, with Flybe’s Summer and Autumn timetables to continue as planned.

It is interesting to note how the sub-£1m price per slot pair compares to some of the crazy prices paid for Heathrow slots in recent years.

Last month, Tesco ran a promotion offering 1,500 bonus Avios points if you converted your Clubcard points to Avios AND set your account to auto-convert.

I did this. It was an easy 1,500 Avios for nothing, as you can easily turn off the auto-convert feature afterwards.

Tesco, unfortunately, made a big mistake.

When it sent the list of auto-convert names to Avios, they were formatted as Initial/Surname. They were meant to be formatted as First Name/Surname.

This meant that the names failed to match up with the Avios database.

This meant they couldn’t find your Avios account.

This meant that most people (perhaps everyone) who selected auto-convert have had a new Avios account opened for them, even though they already have one.

I don’t know if Avios or Tesco are going to manually go through the names or not. At the moment, all you can do is ring Avios and ask them to find your duplicate account. They will then merge it with your main account. Avios is aware of the problem and the agents can deal with it quickly, although it will take 24 hours to merge the accounts.

Do NOT ring them on the main 0844 number because you are then paying them via a premium rate for their own mistake. Ring the non-UK number instead, which is 01925 848 693, and keep pressing 1 to confirm that you are ringing from outside the UK. You appear to queue jump with this number as well.

Because you can earn Avios points both directly and indirectly (eg via Tesco Clubcard or Amex Membership Rewards), the list of possible cards is longer than most people think.

Yesterday’s post comparing sign-up bonuses was the most important part of the exercise.  The easiest way to build up your Avios points, after all, is by card churning to earn multiple sign-up bonuses.

It is also worth running over the various earning rates, though.  For simplicity, I have separated these into ‘best American Express card for earning Avios’ and ‘best Mastercard / Visa for earning Avios’.

The blue links take you to my detailed review of that card.  Before you apply for anything, though, consider the size of the sign-up bonus (see yesterdays post) and annual fee as well as the earning rate.  Many cards also offer a better sign-up deal if you are referred rather than apply direct – you will find full details of referral deals and Quico / TopCashBack details on the ‘Credit Cards Update‘ page of HFP.

Let me be very clear on one point.  I am not suggesting that the best use for the points from all of these cards is to transfer to Avios.  Frankly, you’d be crazy to convert 50,000 Hilton points to 5,000 Avios when you could get a valuable hotel stay out of them.  However, I have listed all of the options for completeness.

American Express cards:

(Click the links for my full review of each card)

1-2 Avios per £1 (1.5-2.5 if spending £15,000 pa) - American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Charge Card

1 Membership Rewards point = 1 Avios.  Double points on supermarket and petrol spend for Year 1, double points forever on foreign and travel spend.  7,500 bonus points on renewal when you spend £15,000 per year, equivalent to an extra 0.5 points per £1.

1.5 Avios per £1 - British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card

Double points on British Airways spend (3 per £1) plus 2-4-1 Avios redemption voucher when spending £10,000 per year.

1.25 Avios per £1 - Lloyds TSB Premier Duo Avios American Express

Double points on foreign spend (2.5 per £1) plus 2-4-1 Avios redemption voucher (Economy only) when spending £15,000 per year.

1.25 Avios per £1 - Starwood Preferred Guest American Express Card

1 Starwood point = 1 Avios, but you get a 25% bonus when converting 20,000 points at once.

1 Avios per £1 - American Express Platinum Charge Card and American Express Green Charge Card

1 Membership Rewards point = 1 Avios

1 Avios per £1 - Lloyds TSB Duo Avios American Express

1 Avios per £1 - British Airways American Express Card

2-4-1 Avios redemption voucher when you spend £20,000 per year

MasterCard and Visa cards:

0.6 Avios per £1 - Tesco Clubcard MasterCard

1 Clubcard point per £4 spent per transaction.  1,000 Clubcard points convert into 2,400 Avios.  Note that your actual earnings rate will be lower because each transaction is rounded down to the nearest £4.

0.4 Avios per £1 - Lloyds TSB Premier Duo Avios MasterCard

2-4-1 Avios redemption voucher (Economy only) when spending £15,000 per year, double points on foreign spend

0.4 Avios per £1 - Priority Club Rewards Black Visa Card

2 Priority Club points per £1.  10,000 Priority Club points convert into 2,000 Avios.  Double points on foreign spend.

0.2 Avios per £1 - Lloyds TSB Duo Avios Mastercard

Double points on foreign spend

0.2 Avios per £1 - Priority Club Rewards Visa Card

1 Priority Club point per £1.  10,000 Priority Club points convert into 2,000 Avios

0.2 Avios per £1 - Marriott Rewards MasterCard

1 Marriott point per £1.  10,000 Marriott Rewards points convert to 2,000 Avios.

0.1 Avios per £1 – Hilton HHonors Platinum Visa

1 Hilton point per £1.  10,000 Hilton HHonors points convert to 1,000 Avios.

My first statement month just ended.  I spent the necessary £5,000 to trigger the full bonus by pre-paying my July tax bill.

And my statement shows (with a minor edit for privacy):

    AADVANTAGE MILES SUMMARY        
    AMEX MILES | 836        
    VISA MILES | 3,264        
    BONUS MILES | 35,000        
    ADJUSTED MILES | 0        
    TOTAL MILES | 39,100 

Which is nice.

Hopefully they will arrive safely at my AA account over the next day or so.

The card is still open for applications for this bonus until 31st May.  Remember that you need to spend £5,000 within 6 months to trigger the full bonus, though.

Now I need to hope that award space opens up for a New York to London day in July.  I am currently booked on BA via Avios with a chunky taxes bill, whilst an AA rebooking would see the taxes fall to almost nothing.

This is not as easy an answer as you might think. Whilst there are the BA and Lloyds TSB cards which issue Avios miles directly, there are other cards which offer points which can be converted into Avios points. If you are intent on squeezing out every free Avios that you possibly can, you might want to get these cards as well!

If you applied for every single credit card which offers Avios points or points which could be converted to Avios, you would earn a whopping 146,400 Avios!

(You could add another 35,000 to that if you used the sign-up bonus on the American Airlines card to book British Airways flights!)

But which of these is the best credit card for Avios?  Today I am focussing purely on sign-up bonuses. Tomorrow I will compare the same cards in terms of their day-to-day earning capacity.

Some of these cards offer a higher bonus if you are referred or offer Quidco or TopCashBack cashback when you apply.  You can find full details of these in the relevant entry on our ‘Credit Cards Update‘ page.

The best Avios-earning personal credit cards:

Listed in order of highest sign-up bonus (click the links for my full review of each card):

30,000 Avios – American Express Platinum Charge Card

30,000 Membership Rewards points convert into 30,000 Avios. £450 annual fee, refunded pro-rata on cancellation. Issuer: Amex. Spend £2,000 in 3 months to trigger bonus.

25,000 Avios – Starwood Preferred Guest American Express Card

20,000 Starwood points convert into 25,000 Avios. £75 annual fee, refunded pro-rata on cancellation. Issuer: Amex. Spend £1,000 in 3 months to trigger bonus. See here for my post on the current 20,000 point SPG offer.

20,000 Avios – American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Charge Card

22,000 Membership Rewards points convert into 22,000 Avios. No annual fee for the first year. Issuer: Amex. Spend £2,000 in 3 months to trigger bonus.

20,000 Avios – Lloyds TSB Premier Duo Avios American Express and MasterCards

£50 annual fee, non-refundable. Issuer: Lloyds TSB. Spend £500 on the Amex card in each of the first three months to trigger bonus. Cannot hold both these cards and the Lloyds TSB Duo cards.

18,000 Avios – British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card

£150 annual fee, refunded pro-rate when you cancel. Issuer: Amex. Spend £3,000 within 3 months to trigger bonus. Cannot hold both this card and the BA Amex.

15,000 Avios – Lloyds TSB Duo Avios American Express and MasterCards

No annual fee. Issuer: Lloyds TSB. Spend £500 on the Amex card in each of the first three months to trigger bonus. Cannot hold both these cards and the Lloyds TSB Premier Duo cards.

8,000 Avios – Priority Club Rewards Black Visa Card

40,000 Priority Club points convert into 8,000 Avios. £99 annual fee, non-refundable. Issuer: Barclaycard. Bonus is triggered with your first purchase.

3,000 Avios – British Airways American Express Card

No annual fee. Issuer: Amex. Spend £500 in 3 months to trigger bonus. Cannot hold both this card and the BA Premium Plus Amex together.

3,000 Avios – Priority Club Rewards Visa Card

15,000 Priority Club points convert into 3,000 Avios (although you need to convert in 10,000 point chunks). No annual fee. Issuer: Barclaycard. Bonus is triggered with your first purchase.

0 Avios (2,400 if referred) - Tesco Clubcard MasterCard

1,000 Clubcard points convert into 2,400 Avios. No annual fee. Issuer: Tesco Bank. Bonus is triggered when you submit the referral form after receiving your card.

2,000 Avios – Marriott Rewards MasterCard

10,000 Marriott Rewards points convert to 2,000 Avios. No annual fee. Issuer: Creation. Spend £200 in 6 months to trigger bonus.

Plus, an honorary mention:

35,000 American Airlines miles – American Airlines AAdvantage American Express and Visa Cards

AA miles can be redeemed for BA flights, but you cannot add them directly to your Avios collection. No annual fee. Issuer: MBNA. Spend to trigger bonus: £5,000 in 180 days. See here for my post on this special promotion.

Tomorrow, I will look at the earning rate on all of these cards.

Since most Head for Points readers convert to BA, this promotion was not hugely useful.

A second version has now appeared, though.

Avios.com is also offering 1,000 bonus Avios if you convert £5 or more of Tesco vouchers to avios.com before 30th June and you have not done a similar conversion since 29th April 2012.

If you usually convert your Clubcard vouchers to ba.com, you may want to have second thoughts this quarter.  Why not send them to avios.com instead?  You will need to open an account at avios.com if you don’t already have one, but this can be done very quickly.  As soon as your Avios have posted, you can move them to British Airways via ‘Combine My Avios’.

Full details can be found here.

When you look to book a hotel at hotels.com, certain properties will show as participating in the M&S promotion. Book one of these and you will receive M&S vouchers after your stay is completed. The value will be:

£25 for a £250-£499 stay, excluding ‘taxes and fees’ (does this mean excluding VAT?)

£50 for a £500-£999 stay

£100 for a £1,000+ stay

The rules are here. You must book by May 30th for stays before August 12th.

The key thing to note is that you can ‘double dip’ with this promotion:

hotels.com has a decent loyalty programme called ‘Welcome Rewards’ which gets you a free night for every 10 nights you book. (One day, I will do a proper post on Welcome Rewards.) These stays will also count towards the free night, and effectively get you another 10% back on your average spendhotels.com currently offers 10.1% cashback via TopCashBack. This cashback will stay pay out on top.

What does NOT seem possible is to ‘triple dip’ – but you should try.

hotels.com pays out 10.1% cashback on TopCashBack and 8% on Quidco.  However, in some tests I did – but not all – the M&S offer appears to disappear if you go via a cashback site.

Here is a screenshot done in Google Chrome going direct to hotels.com – there is a banner under each hotel offering the M&S vouchers (difficult to read, I know, but as least you can see where it should be!):

However, I did a similar search in Internet Explorer, linking through from TopCashBack, and the M&S offer did NOT appear.  However, yesterday I did get it to show at one point after linking through from Quidco.  ‘Keep trying’ is my best advice, using different browsers if necessary.

You need to remember that some chain hotels will not give points or status benefits on rooms booked via hotels.com. If this is not a problem, though, this promotion is worth a look.

(Thanks to Continental Club)