The Daily Mail reports on air miles redemption woes

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• Steve says:

  9 Jun9 June 20:35

  The Daily Mail. Enough said.
  The comments (that have been green arrowed) sum up the average DM reader – too uneducated to appreciate that you sometimes have to look further than the end of your nose.

  Still, it just means more availability for us.

• Andy says:

  9 Jun9 June 20:44

  4500 avios + £15 on BA to a zone 1 destination is good value when you compare what you get with BA and the likes of Ryanair! Calculate the cost of £23KG of check in luggage, seat selection, a drink on board, cost of getting to the airport, check in fees, 2 items of hand luggage with the likes of Ryanair!

• Steve says:

  9 Jun9 June 21:05

  That’s awesome!!!

• Tim says:

  10 Jun10 June 09:08

  “That is, frankly, nonsense ever since BA started offering 1 Avios per mile flown. Even a cheap economy flight to New York earns you enough Avios for a one-way flight in Europe.”

  Raffles, you should appreciate that the majority of people where I live have never been to London let alone New York. Britain is not uniform . Only a tiny, tiny minority are frequent flyers. The Daily Mail findings may represent ill-informed opinion but they are entirely credible.

  FYI, I have been to New York but only by ship 🙂

  • Rob says:

    10 Jun10 June 10:09

    But by default, the people in this survey had flown and collected some miles – it wasn’t 1,000 people randomly picked off the street!

    • Mr Bridge says:

      10 Jun10 June 22:21

      daily mail readers are randomly picked of their ill informed high horses…charge

      • Mr Bridge says:

        10 Jun10 June 22:23

        sorry i cant resist the chance to have a go at the DM, as a gay man their has never been such a homophobic publication.

• Kathy says:

  10 Jun10 June 13:18

  Ah, but not everyone will realise that they can collect Avios by flying! It wasn’t possible under the old airmiles scheme, which was collection by shopping only.

  Plus, non-frequent flyers who only really go abroad for holidays might be flyng Easyjet/Ryanair or for a package holiday, and so might not even be flying on a Oneworld carrier and able to collect Avios on their flights..

  Remember, the old Airmiles scheme was offering something for ‘free’ – something that could be collected over a number of years through normal shopping behaviour. It appealed to a lot of people who aren’t very well off for that reason – it might have taken years to save up for two flights to New York, but that would have made an otherwise unaffordable trip possible.

• Jane Easthope says:

  10 Jun10 June 14:23

  Me and my mum collected enough points shopping with Tesco to convert to airmiles to get flights to go visit relatives in Australia. There were plenty of extra point in store offers so it wasn’t even that much of an ordeal. So, compared to that, collecting avios seems an slow and unrewarding process. I’m a library assistant so I’m lucky to have a job at the moment, getting rewarded for business travel is an unimaginably distant thing to imagine, and I was unemployed for several years and collected some bad debt, so i couldn’t get even a fee free credit card with bonus points, (I wouldn’t be able to afford one with a fee).

  But still I check Head for Points every morning just in case there’s a deal I can’t miss, even though I’ll only be able to use the points for “poor value redemptions” because I don’t have any money to pay towards them.

• Roger says:

  11 Jun11 June 09:55

  Kathy said: ‘Ah, but not everyone will realise that they can collect Avios by flying! It wasn’t possible under the old airmiles scheme, which was collection by shopping only.’

  What?? Air Miles (as it was then spelt) was BA’s original frequent flyer scheme predating BA Miles by several years. I was earning far more flying BA than by shopping at Sainsbury’s and using my NatWest Visa and Mastercard.

  Partners change but award flights remain.

• Kathy says:

  11 Jun11 June 13:13

  Seriously, at the point when I joined Airmiles, you couldn’t earn them by flying. It was very confusing that the scheme was called Airmiles when it wasn’t a frequent flyer but a frequent shopper scheme, but there you go. The BA Miles frequent flyer scheme was something different altogether, and you couldn’t transfer points between the two.

  The change to Avios was doubtless partly about harmonising the schemes so that the same rules would apply to everyone for collection and redemption.

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