Bits: Priority Pass relaunch, Cathay devalues, using pay.com to top up Amazon accounts

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

• scott says:

  1 Oct1 October 05:32

  all I’ve got to do now is find some pay.com gift cards….been to over 15 different tescos on my travels in the past week and found 1.I think Tesco are purposely taking them off the shelves or not falling over themselves to restock ?

  • Andrew says:

    1 Oct1 October 06:09

    Agree. 4 tescos near me. All with a plentiful suppl at start of August. Cleared out over first couple of weeks of August (seemingly noone else buying). None restocked in the 1.5 months since. Just heaps of the physical fee version instead! Twas good whilst it lasted.

    • Emily says:

      1 Oct1 October 10:24

      Exactly the same near me. All had pay.com over the summer, now all only have hundreds of the paid Visa ones. Was using them to buy Waitrose vouchers to do my weekly shop there for approx. 9 avios/£ (including the ones from my old Diamond Club AMEX).

      Though always seemed to get a new person on the checkout who had no idea how to put vouchers through!

    • Nick says:

      1 Oct1 October 12:56

      Same here too around Birmingham and the West Mids…. loads around until a couple of weeks ago, now totally dry 🙁

  • Dee Jay says:

    1 Oct1 October 06:20

    I think they have taken them off the shelves as I went to one which had at least 150 available for weeks and then one day they all disappeared, they wouldn’t let people buy more than 5 in a transaction so I doubt anyone cleared them out especially with the amount of failed activations.

    • Scott says:

      1 Oct1 October 06:28

      From PTS, it does seem that Tesco aren’t stocking these anymore so if you do find one, it’s blind luck.
      May change in the future but I’m betting one side or the other has had enough of problems / losses and has pulled the plug.
      No intention of buying the fee based ones i.e £50 + £3.95 fee as these mean you’re paying well over 2.5p per clubcard point.
      (My local store, well the one that did stock pay.com, cleared all their pay.com cards a couple of weeks ago and replaced them with around 30 pegs of the £25 red fee based cards)

      • Alan says:

        1 Oct1 October 06:49

        Although the paid-for ones can still be handy if you have a conditional spend voucher that you wouldn’t otherwise use – that more than covers the fee (plus you can cash out the fee-based ones to NS&I).

        • Jason says:

          1 Oct1 October 07:15

          Ns&i route was closed in February.
          Tesco have problems with all gift cards not just pay.coms, I was told yesterday whilst buying some.

        • Alan says:

          1 Oct1 October 07:35

          Ah, hadn’t realised they’d shut it for the paid-for ones too.

        • Scott says:

          1 Oct1 October 07:44

          The conditional spend coupons are so few and far between that using them with the fee base cards earns you very little at the end of the day.
          You may get 6 in a year tops so that’s a minimum of 900 points and that’s nothing compared to picking up a load of pay.com cards. Also you do need the right cashier to accept the coupon.

          Really going to hit my points earning as I use them a lot for holidays, Virgin Media, Amazon etc and not really into buying Lego, pre-order Disney things etc.

        • Alan says:

          1 Oct1 October 07:51

          I think it varies – for a while I was getting them almost every shop, so each £5 off £50 spend covered the card fee. They may have dried up for a while though. Never had any issues with checkout agents as long as I mixed them in with some groceries too.

• JQ says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:07

  “You could fly the equivalent of London to New York a ludicrous 119 times one-way in economy and still not qualify for a Silver card at 600 points.”

  It’s actually worse than that, if starting from scratch you will need 1000 CX TPs as they reset after you reach each level. (The year also resets – like how BA used to be before 2011?)

• Idrive says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:35

  RIP CX Gold mine died last night But luckily managed to use it as far as i could! And i loved it!

  • pauldb says:

    1 Oct1 October 13:25

    Same for me and the wife. Was a generous run of extensions but I guess that’s over. Fortunately we managed to match it over for another 6 months of QF Gold, but maybe the trail of breadcrumbs ends there.

• harry says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:52

  For some reason I can’t usually click through to IE from HFP these days, though the same IP address opens immediately in Chrome.

  Link will save a few minutes, which all helps.

  Pay.com availability: my guess is there’s been a memo to the effect that if they’re troublesome to put through, take them off sale. I was in one Tesco where (after buying a few in 4s) I jammed the activation process buying another 4. You know the situation, 1 fails to activate, you remove it then the new 4th one repeatedly fails to activate. You start over with a fresh 2, and they don’t activate either.

  The supervisor just removed them all from sale and the peg has been empty ever since.

  • Jason says:

    1 Oct1 October 09:24

    It would really help if they understood how they work. Most now know to total individually after each card but when one fails they assume it’s already been activated which is not the case, wait 2 mins, or do some other ones and it always works fir the one that failed.

• Mike says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:53

  This is certainly timely as it appears that American express no longer accepts pay.com visa numbers to pay your bill, seems to have stopped about a week ago, or has anyone else had any joy. Pity as it was a relatively straightforward buy £200 pay.com visa in tesco on my card and then go home activate card and then pay off American express. Still plenty of pay.com around me but they are all dated May 15 , i can buy £200 every 3 days with no problem apart from the usual faff at the till about having to enter sub total every card, but fortunately the staff in my tesco are mega helpful to me. With the Amazon route is it possible to withdraw your money and transfer to your bank ?

  • Grimz says:

    1 Oct1 October 09:04

    How can you tell there all dated May 15?

  • Nick says:

    1 Oct1 October 09:17

    Hang on….

    you could use pay.com to pay an amex credit card bill?!? I thought that was impossible? If it was possible, I spent bloody ages wasting time finding other ways to use them! Damn!

    • SoloFlyer says:

      1 Oct1 October 13:36

      I have been buying and using them to pay off my Amex bill last couple months. Must have put through around £2k shame if they have stopped accepting them

  • Nick M says:

    1 Oct1 October 09:21

    Surely having lots of different cards paying £25 off the bill each month would trigger your account to be looked at? I did a couple but then thought it wasn’t worth the hassle of any potential investigation…

  • Gulz says:

    1 Oct1 October 09:34

    I am fairly certain that it has been impossible to pay amex card bill with pay.com cards. I tried that a while ago (albeit it was 3v cards then), and it didn’t work. 3v had blocked the card for use in any financial transaction.

    • JQ says:

      1 Oct1 October 10:22

      It was possible for a brief period in September, but some idiot publicised it on Flyertalk.

      • harry says:

        1 Oct1 October 20:13

        How else are social networks meant to function? 🙂

    • TimS says:

      1 Oct1 October 12:49

      I managed to use them to pay off Amex in August after my local Tesco started restocking them but then the local supply dried up!

    • Mike says:

      1 Oct1 October 19:53

      Er I meant Apr 15. How to tell = date us printed bottom left on each pay.com card for Apr 15 it reads 0415 , there was a print run in Aug 15 but I have not seen these ina Tesco. I would be interested to here if any Aug At cards have been seen in Tesco

• Hingeless says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:54

  Priority pass needs to get some lounges in Australia. The only lounge you can access is at the international terminal in cairns, this is one of the quietest international terminals in the county.

  I also lost my friendly CX gold card last night, now if only i could do a stays match with my Etihad card to a One world airline.

• harry says:

  1 Oct1 October 06:57

  ESSO ALERT!

  Check your cards, £5 off £50 until 12/11/15

  • Jason says:

    1 Oct1 October 07:28

    Thanks Harry, only have it on my gold amex though 🙂 🙁

    • harry says:

      1 Oct1 October 07:43

      Yep drawing a blank on most of mine but should go through to non Amex Amex & hopefully general release/ supps quite quickly.

  • Simon says:

    1 Oct1 October 07:42

    Thanks Harry. Only appeared on one of my 3 cards, but all helps!

  • Fenny says:

    1 Oct1 October 08:24

    My new car doesn’t have a big enough tank to spend £50 on petrol any more. I’m not sure if there are any local Esso stations with Tesco stores.

    • mark2 says:

      1 Oct1 October 13:11

      I have read that if a Tesco Express with Esso you can buy a Tesco gift card to use in big Tesco to buy gift cards
      Have not tried it myself yet

• ee says:

  1 Oct1 October 07:04

  Still some pay.com in my local area but not as easy to find as previously…

  • Kipto says:

    1 Oct1 October 07:29

    So can you use the paid Visa cards to pay your Amex bill,?

    • Reney says:

      1 Oct1 October 13:18

      I tried and it didn’t work.

    • TimS says:

      1 Oct1 October 13:22

      You could for a while, but not anymore.

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