Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Bits: 50 free Avios via Avios Suitcase, Cathay business sale, Plaza Premium in Singapore

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News in brief:

Avios Suitcase is back

Avios Suitcase is a Facebook app which allows you to earn Avios points – credited to avios.com and NOT British Airways Executive Club accounts – for completing various simple tasks and earning ‘badges’.

If you’ve never tried it, log into Facebook and search for Avios Suitcase.

A new badge has appeared which offers an easy 50 Avios points.  The badge is entitled ‘Guess The Currency – July’.  You don’t need to share anything to get the Avios.  You only need to answer a simple question.  I won’t spoil the fun by telling you the answer!

Cathay Pacific business class sale to China, Australia and the Philippines

BA’s fellow oneworld member, Cathay Pacific, is running a sale on business class tickets to China.  You can fly from London or Manchester, via Hong Kong, to Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangzhou or Chengdu, for £1,899 return.  Flights to the Philippines are £1,959 return whilst Australia is £2,979.

You need to book by July 31st for travel at any point in 2015 except for September.  Tickets, at least on the China routes (check the rules for the others) are refundable for a £250 fee which is very generous given that this is a sale.

You earn Avios and tier points on Cathay Pacific flights and, of course, their seats and service are very highly regarded.

More details can be found on the Cathay website here.

Cathay business class

Plaza Premium opens a lounge at Singapore Changi Terminal 1

If you are passing through Singapore on British Airways this Summer, you have a new lounge option if you have a Priority Pass (free with Amex Platinum) or Lounge Club (free with Amex Gold) card.

Plaza Premium, which operates the very well regarded independent lounges in Heathrow Terminal 2 and Terminal 4, has expanded into Changi Terminal 1.  The lounge, pictured above, covers 7,000 square feet and includes a live cooking station.

If you don’t have a way of getting free access, you can also pay at approximately £27 per person.  You can find out more on the Plaza Premium website here.


Getting airport lounge access for free from a credit card

How to get FREE airport lounge access via UK credit cards (October 2024)

Here are the four options to get FREE airport lounge access via a UK credit card.

The Platinum Card from American Express comes with two free Priority Pass cards, one for you and one for a supplementary cardholder. Each card admits two so a family of four gets in free. You get access to all 1,500 lounges in the Priority Pass network – search it here.

You also get access to Eurostar, Lufthansa and Delta Air Lines lounges.  Our American Express Platinum review is here.

You can apply here.

The Platinum Card from American Express

50,000 bonus points and great travel benefits – for a large fee Read our full review

If you have a small business, consider American Express Business Platinum instead.

American Express Business Platinum

Up to 80,000 points when you sign-up and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold is FREE for the first year. It comes with a Priority Pass card loaded with four free visits to any Priority Pass lounge – see the list here.

Additional lounge visits are charged at £24.  You get four more free visits for every year you keep the card.  

There is no annual fee for Amex Gold in Year 1 and you get a 20,000 points sign-up bonus.  Full details are in our American Express Preferred Rewards Gold review here.

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

HSBC Premier World Elite Mastercard gets you get a free Priority Pass card, allowing you access to the Priority Pass network.  Guests are charged at £24 although it may be cheaper to pay £60 for a supplementary credit card for your partner.

The card has a fee of £290 and there are strict financial requirements to become a HSBC Premier customer.  Full details are in my HSBC Premier World Elite Mastercard review.

HSBC Premier World Elite Mastercard

A good package, but only available to HSBC Premier clients Read our full review

PS. You can find all of HfP’s UK airport lounge reviews – and we’ve been to most of them – indexed here.

Comments (30)

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

  • Neil says:

    I have just canx by Amex Plat. Does anyone know if the Priority Pass would still be usable? Thanks

    • Polly says:

      No, it cancels the same day, some say it can take a while, but be prepared for a lets charge to appear!
      CX, anyone trying for ex EU flights to Asia, don’t bother, no price differential.

    • Rob says:

      No, cancelled immediately as the pass fails when there is no valid credit card stored to pay for extra guests.

      • BP says:

        Mine took 6 months to cancel. I kept using it without any issue!

  • James says:

    Did the sub £900 ex Scandinavia deals finish?

    • Rob says:

      Wait a bit, Qatar may bring them back!

      • James67 says:

        I suspect more likely to return in autumn or winter, but then anythings possible given frequency of Qatar promotions.

  • Philip White says:

    Just tried the Avios Suitcase app on FB. It finds it in the search menu but when I click through I get the following error message, “The page you requested was not found”…
    Have we crashed it?

  • Stuart Fortune says:

    That avios suitcase currency isn’t all that hard to guess. If you are struggling, have a look at the filename of the picture! Bit of a giveaway.

  • Adam W says:

    Why would you promote the CX fares and refuse to do likewise for a recent promo (that you knew about but chose not to blog about) that would have got your readers the exact same flights to Australia for around £2000?

    And, of course, entirely unrelated to that… what’s your commission through linking to the CX website from readers buying the £2979 fare to Australia?

    Please try a little harder to keep your integrity.

    • Rob says:

      It is purely down to what I am sent by the airlines and what HFP space is available on the day. The only connection to the affiliate links is that, if I have links, the airlines send me all their deals. I can’t write about what I don’t know about.

      1% of the ex-tax value of a Cathay flight in the article is about £13. That is peanuts in the context of HFP – it is 1,000% easier to make £10 off an Uber or Get Taxi sign-up! – and has no impact on what is covered.

      It is, anyway, an illogical argument – because the £2,000 Cathay flights which I didn’t bother covering as there was no space on the day would, by definition, have been far more attractive than £3,000 ones.

      • Dan says:

        I totally agree with rob here – I think he does a pretty amazing job to run 3 articles every day of the year (including Christmas Day!). Even if he was earning 50% commission from advertising that deal it still wouldn’t nearly cover the amount of money he’s saved me (and lots of others) over the last year! So would begrudge it.

        I expect that choice over which articles to run is just like any other journalistic media – you choose what your readers will want to read about on any given day!

        • Rob says:

          We are closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, to be honest – although I still tend to respond to comments ….

    • Kai says:

      He has every right to promote or not promote anything as he likes, as long as the information he gives is right.

    • Polly says:

      Honestly Adam, you have little to complain about. Best to keep your negative comments to yourself actually, they are not in the spirit of the blog. Raffles updates us even on promos that come in through the day, ESP flight promos which save us all £1000s of £s. So we are actually very grateful for his time and effort. In fact, even we pop in the odd promo that come to us as individual subscribers to airlines, hotels before he gets them,.We all close to share the info, as someone is bound to benefit, including you, am sure. If you don’t like the format then please sign off. He is extremely fair in his advice.

  • bob says:

    Was at a London Tesco today – Hayes is it? near Heathrow – and saw that there were Pay.coms galore, depleted, though. So they ARE hitting London 😉

    • Rob says:

      That’s a very generous interpretation of London in my view! We’re talking about a UB postcode 🙂

  • Brian says:

    I must say that Adam W has a real chip on his shoulder about Rob and/or HfP. I do wonder why he takes the time to read it and make all these negative comments.

    I wondered why Rob didn’t find time or space to cover the recent Accor 40% off + free breakfast sale, which I felt was definitely worthy of coverage, but I don’t hold it against him for not doing so.

    • Rob says:

      Accor stuff gets very low readership levels so I am selective in what I run. That said, there is an Accor article tomorrow and Monday. If I am away then I also rely more on pre-written pieces which means that there is less news coverage and thus the bar for being included is higher.

      • Brian says:

        Interesting that there should be little interest in Accor, which is probably the best value hotel chain, in my opinion. Still, each to his own.

        • Lionel says:

          not of interest

        • Rob says:

          It is not lack of interest in the hotels but lack of interest in a dull loyalty scheme which offers no scope for aspirational redemptions!

          • Philip White says:

            The implementation of the Le Club benefits by the hotels in the various chains is hit and miss at best. The only time being a Platinum member appears to be worthwhile is at Pullman or Sofitel properties.

          • Brian says:

            Yes, but that just goes to show how a lot of us take the wrong approach and allow us to be a bit blinded by the idea of leverage. If you take an objective look at the Accor scheme, you get 2 Eurocents per point in value – fixed. The points calculator on Accor tells me that I get 620 points for spending 100 GBP as a Platinum member. That’s 12.40 Euros in value – about 9%. So you get 9% worth of value back for your stays.

            Compare that to IHG – you earn 1000 points per 100 dollars or 65 pounds, or about 1500 points per 100 pounds, if my maths is correct. You value (generously, in my opinion) IHG points at 0.5p each, based on using them for an IC. Now, I would say that is very much a top-end valuation – given that I wouldn’t pay that sort of money for an Intercontinental, it’s a theoretical valuation for me and I tend to get about 0.3p per point in real terms. But even so, at 0.5p per point, 1500 points per 100 pounds spent is 7.5% of value. Yes, IHG does bonus points, too, but on a no more generous scale than Accor does.

            So you’re getting 7.5% of value back on your IHG stays in a best-case scenario, and probably much less normally, whereas you get 9% back on your Accor stays. Throw in the fact that ALL points count towards status with Accor and that status benefits with Accor are real at certain properties (Exec Lounge at Sofitel), whereas they are limited to a possible upgrade with IHG, and it’s clear that the idea of ‘aspirational redemptions’ is purely a fantasy.

  • Colin JE says:

    Err, back on topic ( for which apologies )
    How do I know I’ve linked my Avios suitcase to my account? It says there’s a badge for it. Just worried my account will reset to zero and I lose my 220 points.

    • Colin JE says:

      No worries, the Avios have appeared on my account a few days later. Thanks for the tip Adam.

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

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