Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get £50 cashback when you spend £150 at American Express Travel

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This very generous offer – £50 cashback – has just been launched as part of the American Express partnership with TripAdvisor.

The Amex / TripAdvisor arrangement is an odd one.  Once you have linked your American Express account to your TripAdvisor account, a little mark will appear next to any review you write saying that it is an “Amex Cardmember Review”.  Does this add to the sum of human happiness?  Probably not.

However, £50 off a £150 travel spend is a different matter.

This is a slightly complex promotion and you need to make sure you follow all the steps.

You MUST connect your Amex card to TripAdvisor using the link on this page. Once logged in to TripAdvisor you must go to ‘Get Offers’ and save the offer to your Amex card.

You need to spend £150 on pre-paid flights, hotels, experiences or car hire at americanexpress.co.uk/travel

Non pre-paid products do NOT count

You need to make your booking by December 18th but there are no limits on when you fly or stay

Only one statement credit per card (supplementary cards may or may not count separately)

Apart from that, you can book anything you like.

This promotion would work best when booking a flight because you will still earn airline miles and status credits for flights however they are booked.  It also works fine for car hire and non-chain hotels.

Remember that any chain hotel booked by Amex Travel may not count for points, status benefits or stay credit.  That said, as Amex is a major corporate travel agent I would expect that you have a pretty good chance of getting credit for your stay.   You certainly have more chance than you would if you booked via Expedia.

Full details, promotion rules and the link to connect your card to TripAdvisor can be found here.

ALL American Express personal cards are eligible, even those issued by Lloyds, Barclays and MBNA.  The exact wording is:

Only consumer cards issued in the UK by American Express Services Europe Limited or a licensed third party issuer are eligible for registration (eligible card). The following cards are not eligible: prepaid cards, gift cards and corporate cards.

American Express is also still giving away £5 statement credit when you connect your card and post your first Tripadvisor review.  Details are via the same link.


Want to earn more points from credit cards? – April 2024 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current 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

You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

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

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

15,000 bonus points and 1.5 points for every £1 you spend Read our full review

Earning miles and points from small business cards

If you are a sole trader or run a small company, you may also want to check out these offers:

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

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

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

For a non-American Express option, we also recommend the Barclaycard Select Cashback card for sole traders and small businesses. It is FREE and you receive 1% cashback on your spending.

Barclaycard Select Cashback Business Credit Card

1% cashback uncapped* on all your business spending (T&C apply) Read our full review

Comments (82)

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

  • Georgie says:

    Are you allowed to have multipule tripadvisor accounts?

  • Leo says:

    By the way, be careful of the comparative flight costs.

    I just checked some economy european flights and they were more expensive than booking directly through BA by almost £50.

    Sort of defeats the point.

    • JQ says:

      Yes, as I mentioned in the first post, HBO fares are not sold by Amex online and usually they don’t have the cheapest booking classes available either.

      However, if W is cheaper than Y as can sometimes be the case, you can book W online – try middle east to LHR on BA in summer.

      • James67 says:

        Any experience on amex hotel pricing? I was planning to use the offer mostly for those but my first impression following preliminary searcheslast night was not good. I decided to leave it until I had time to compare with other sites at the weekend.

  • idrive says:

    I have just successfully ended booking my Christmas itinerary. I did something I never do, booked 3 separate flights (1 every week) risking an increase in tariffs and lack of availability every single day against a full return ready to go with Lufthansa (no direct on the way back though).
    i now just booked my outbound on AMEX via Tripadvisor. Total cost of the outbound £154-50=£104 after credit which i hope will post soon.
    the same flight quoted today since last week till today 8 pm £219on BA, £172 with IBERIA, £154 after EURfx with Vueling, £173 with AMEX (-50)=123.
    after 8 i found out that BA brought the ticket down to £163, IBERIA £134, VUELING £148, ended buyin on AMEXtravel at 154-50!
    Thank you Raffles and you all! I spared money, will fly OW all my trip, good flight times, gather Avios and visit a new place!
    Now i just need to book my hotel, which I will try to book via booking as two separate nights and as I am planning to stay in NH Hotel, I should be able to receive bonus Avios for each night. I called NH (Iberia promo) they did not know much they just said “show your Iberia card at the hotel”, which means apparently that i do not need to buy via iberia! is that possible? I will give them a call tomorrow to double check, the person on the phone was not very helpful.

    any advice for BCN hotels, by the way? position?
    thanksssssss I love HFP! this has opened up a lot of endless possibilities to me and 2015 will be much more intense hopefully!

    • Rob says:

      Not been to Barcelona for a while, the W and Ritz Carlton on the beach have always been the iconic places but a bit of a walk from the shops.

  • James67 says:

    To get the £5 for first review after linking card do I need to use the review option specified under the offer at amex hub or will review submitted via any section on the site qualify?

  • Geoggy says:

    dies this definitely not work if you make the booking on the phone?

    looking at car hire and they have the location i need to collect from on the phone but not online

  • Martin says:

    In case anyone else had this problem…

    I linked my Amex some time ago. When I log in to Tripadvisor, I don’t have a “Get Offers” link on main screen, but I found it by going to “More” on the top menu and then selecting “Amex Traveller Hub”.

    All I need to find out now is which Amex i linked. I can’t find anything that says…

    • James67 says:

      Check your email. Unless you deleted it at the time of receipt you will still have an email from tripadvisorconfirming the last 4 digits of card you linked.

  • Ben Randall says:

    Anyone know why americanexpress.co.uk/travel doesn’t show flights from Asiana Airlines whereas amextravel.com (the US site) does? Frustrating as the Ts + Cs of this offer say it must be booked via the UK link.

  • idrive says:

    urgent urgent: is a cumulative expense fine?
    i need to book a £100 and a £60 on two different tickets!
    need to book now, and amex site is also down. otherwise i book on airliners’ websites!
    thankss

    • Rob says:

      We don’t know. Cumulative spend usually does NOT count but for the TFL promo it clearly is (and it did for the Hailo offer although that was stated as being cumulative).

      One option is to book anyway and then complain to Amex later that you didn’t know it wasn’t cumulative … 90% chance they will pay (and fair enough as they have had £150 of business from you).

      • idrive says:

        thanks Raffles, i will try it. i will write a reply tomorow. can not now

        • Iskilots says:

          Looking back some dude said cumulative spend was fine for WHSmiths, he bought £3 sandwiches over several days

          • idrive says:

            yes i remember.

            By the way I booked through AMEX Travel just now, i screen printed the T&C so to challenge if discount is not applied. The very nice customer service rep i spoke to knew about the Tripadvisor promo, confirmed you can use it per each card you hold, did not know about cumulative but in anycase AMEX offered the best price and even beated the official airliners’ ones by £15 on one of the tickets and exactly the same price on the Iberia’s one.

            Will see when the discount is applied! thanks all again and a nice weekend.

            Tomorrow’s job will be checking out the Avios/Iberia promos…i now need to concentrate on my birthday’s trip!!

            By the way, just for you who hold an Amex Plat: check out the ClubCarlsons 241 442 offers, i got a very nice price offer for Stockholm! so far! beating all the rest!

          • Alan says:

            Hehe, yep that was me 😀 It does seem to vary a bit by offer, sometimes it states things explicitly but it hasn’t here so you’d have a reasonable case to put to Amex if it doesn’t post. Hopefully we should know soon from folk that have made separate transactions.

          • Simon says:

            The First Great Western offer was cumulative as well, I made 2 bookings a couple of weeks apart which came to over £50 and got £10 back.

          • idrive says:

            do you really need to travel by 19/11? how can they now? in my opinion this would work by buying any ticket just issued by FGW

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