Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

My successful afternoon at Tesco ….

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I had a very successful afternoon at Tesco yesterday.

Purchase 1

Three giftcards, total value £50. I bought these using a ‘£5 off £50 spend’ voucher that Tesco had posted to me. The ‘150 Clubcard points for spending £50 on gift cards’ promo is still running as well.

End result: £50 of giftcards and 150 Clubcard points (360 Avios) for £45 spend.

Purchase 2

I collected 20 ink cartridges from the ‘Click and Collect’ desk. As per this promotion, I paid £2 each and got 200 bonus Clubcard points for every two I bought.

End result: 2,040 Clubcard points (4,896 Avios) for £40 spend.

Now, the latter – which works out at 0.82p per Avios – is not, I admit, a fantastic bargain. In fact, it is marginally above my bottom-end Avios valuation of 0.75p.

However, I am 80% certain that there will be another Tesco to Avios conversion bonus during 2013. If there is a ‘50% bonus Avios’ promotion, then my cost per Avios will fall to 0.55p, which is fine.

At the very, very, very worst, I would use the vouchers in-store during a ‘double up’ promotion and get back £40.80 for my £40 spend!

I will also, at some point next year when the rush has died down, try to sell them on eBay and recoup a few pence per cartridge. It won’t be a huge amount, though, given that they only sell for £2 in Tesco and postage costs (given their thickness) will be fairly high.

So, not a bad afternoon.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (December 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

Get 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

30,000 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 – 30,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

Huge 80,000 bonus points and great travel benefits – for a large 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

20,000 points (ONLY TO 9TH DECEMBER) Read our full review

Capital on Tap Pro Visa

30,000 points (TO 9TH DECEMBER) plus good benefits Read our full review

There is also a British Airways American Express card for small businesses:

British Airways American Express Accelerating Business

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

50,000 points when you sign-up 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 (11)

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

  • idenvillage says:

    personally i would return the ink cartridges, and see if the clubcard points get reveresd

  • JamesQ says:

    GTA worked fine in Kensington Tesco and was running until the 18th, don’t you live near there?

    • Raffles says:

      I do, but I wasn’t certain they had as they didn’t have Call of Duty when they did the similar offer a few months ago. So I couldn’t face the 3 stops on the tube and risking my life crossing Cromwell Road to find out for sure!

  • Martin says:

    Interesting that they accepted the £5 off £50 spend coupon since gift cards are explicitly excluded.

    • Raffles says:

      Bad wording by Tesco. Tesco gift cards are excluded from conditional spends and the coupon does reject if used on those. Fine on others. Still got one £5 off £50 to go for 2 weeks time!

  • Thunderbirds says:

    Raffles, perhaps the most interesting issue in this thread is your valuation of Avios. Perhaps you should start a thread so we can chip in on that…

  • Rich says:

    If you register for Foursquare and sync Amex, then check in at Tesco, you can also get £10 statement credit back when you spend £50, even more savings!

    …then create a new account and sync other Amex cards to use multiple times 🙂

    • Raffles says:

      I am now working on this, I will run a post in a couple of days!

      • Rich says:

        Excellent! Would be good to have a concise list of places the offers are enabled for. Can’t for life of me find anything online.

        You seen the Amex and XBox sync offers? £10 just for syncing, £25 statement credit when you spend £50 at Topman, carphone warehouse, Dixons etc?

        • Raffles says:

          Don’t have an xbox!

          Apart from the small shops stores, the other FS deals seem to be Tesco, Gap, Starbucks, Harvey Nichols, Argos and, looking at the other comment, House of Fraser, HMV and Fenwick. Not necessarily all branches take part though.

          I have brought forward my Foursquare post to tomorrow, so we can all go through it together then!

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

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