News in brief:
DragonPass lounge card now accepted at Heathrow Terminal 5 and Gatwick South Regus
DragonPass, the Asian-based airport lounge access business (a clone of Priority Pass) is beginning to make inroads into the UK market. With the demise of Airport Angel, they have picked up the lounge access deal offered to Barclays current account holders.
Without telling anyone, DragonPass has launched a deal with the Regus business centre in Terminal 5 arrivals at Heathrow and the South terminal (landside) at Gatwick. This is a small coup given that Priority Pass does not have such an arrangement.
Regus in Terminal 5 is a business centre more than an airport lounge. There is no free food but there is a free Nespresso coffee machine. There are two sofa chairs, plus two ‘pods’ for working and a shared table of six seats best suited for working. There are no newspapers but there are some magazines. The photo below shows you how it looks.
It is not somewhere to ‘lounge’ but, if you need to work before or after a flight and do not have British Airways lounge access, it is not a bad place to go. I was working in there yesterday before catching an afternoon flight to Finland (more on that soon).
20% discount on selected Tesco gift cards
Tesco is currently offering a 20% discount on selected gift cards via their online gift card shop. It is not clear if this offer is also available instore (edit: comments below imply it is).
The retailers included are:
- Pizza Express
- iTunes
- Mitchell & Butlers
- New Look
- Monsoon
- Accessorize
The deal is only available on ‘plastic’ gift cards and not digital gift codes. This means that you must pay for postage which will add at least £1.50.
The key thing to remember is that you will receive 150 Clubcard points for every £50 you spend on gift cards (excluding Tesco-branded cards). That is 360 Avios. You need to spend £50 after taking into account the 20% discount and your order must be in multiples of £50 – ie if you spend £100 there must be a theoretical way of separating the order into two lots of £50, otherwise you just get one lot of bonus points.
Pizza Express cards come in a £20 denomination and the others as £25. The cheapest route is therefore 2 x £20 Pizza Express and 1 x £25 from elsewhere, total £65, which reduces to £52. Postage adds £1.50 or more if you want recorded delivery. This means that you are paying £53.50 for £60 of gift cards plus 360 Avios points.
The deal ends on 22nd November.
Love Clubcard, don’t collect Avios? You should be reading our sister site, Shopper Points (www.shopperpoints.co.uk), which covers the latest Clubcard and Nectar offers without any distracting frequent flyer talk! Why not check it out now?
About Head for Points
You can buy 120 of iTunes codes for £100 as long as you select 5 25 vouchers. No postal charges for that.
125!
Actually 125!
Or buy 5 20 PE cards and 1 iTunes 25 card, which is what I did yesterday when they had run out of £50 paid Visa cards 🙂
O/T Does anyone have problem topping up their Amazon account with the paid VISA cards?
Half the time, it doesn’t accept it but it seems random.
If you’re trying to top up exactly to the value of the card it may fail if Amazon puts through an authorization hold (a temporary £1 test transaction) first. That will eventually be reversed of course, but in the meantime your £50 top-up will fail since only £49 is available on the card.
In my nearest Tesco Extra they do PE gift cards in £20s and £30s. Last night I bought one of each (costing me £40 after the discount) along with a £10 Starbucks gift card to round up my spend to £50 to get the 150 CC points. Sweet.
Saw this offer in my local superstore yesterday, so I would assume it to be available in all stores which will save on the postage.
You can get the Dragonpass x6 lounge entries for £13.50 http://www.barclays.co.uk/TravelPlusPack/TravelPlusPack/P1242609324028
That’s just 1 month’s insurance but if you cancel after 1 month, the Dragonpass cards remain valid for 12 months. = £2.25/ visit.
Hi Harry,
Have you confirmation that the DragonPass card (and the unused 6 free visits) remain valid for the 12 months even though you cancel the Travel Plus Pack?
Just checked the T & C’s (which of course are never set in stone. All depends on the process but…)
Should you choose to cancel your Qualifying
Account or switch to a non-qualifying account,
your membership will be immediately
cancelled and your Free Visit allocation
removed. Any pre-paid additional airport
lounge visits which you have purchased and
not used will be refunded to you
Yep but you wouldn’t cancel the account (ie current account) – you would stop the travel insurance pack. They advertise the travel pack as being flexible product that can be switched on or of as per your needs.
£53.50 for £65 worth of cards
It gets a lot better than that if you have the Amex esso offer on your card 🙂
More detail?
£5 off £50 spend Esso deal (till 13/11/15)?
Yep, plus triple mr points in first year 🙂
Amex, tesco and tastecard pay me to eat in PE…… 🙂 almost
If your local Esso sells gift cards (none near me do) and also the offer ends on 12th Nov I think.
DragonPass is included as part of the package of benefits you get from having a Regus office (we have just signed up for a Regus office in Welwyn so spent some time reading the bumf!) Assume that is how they are getting the Regus tie up.
If you want to go to Pizza Express you’re probably better off converting Clubcard vouchers to Pizza Express tokens at 1 to 4.
I am not 100% sure, but the PE gift card is like a payment card and you can use it with tokens.
You could use the tokens to pay for the food and the gift card to pay for the drinks and whatever is left of food bill after tokens.
If Pizza Express is your thing I suggest a Tastecard + gift card from Tesco.
No need for the Tastecard. PE has permanent 25% – 40% off offers!
Tastecard offers 241 on every course, mon-thu, the PE offers have lots of restrictions ime. Not accepted on piccolo menu unfortunately.
I’ve also had Tastecard work for Pizza Express over weekends too – depends on their offers at the time. the terms seem to always change!
Definitely not. Those Tesco coupons can’t be stacked with ANY offers. That means that they are only useful on a Saturday, when neither tastecard nor the various voucher codes are valid. If you tend to eat at Pizza Express on a Saturday, okay, but otherwise there are better uses for your CC points.
… and Friday and Sunday afternoon.
Basically those PE offers are only working when you normally wouldn’t go to the restaurant. IMO PE tokens are a good value.
Hello,
I’ve just tried to log on to the site, I needed to register as it didn’t take my usual tescos password. I was about to complete my transaction but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to register your clubcard details. What am I missing?
That’s the only reason I’ve never done it before too.
Seems its not Tesco supplying the cards, I fail to see how they link up with your CC account.
You enter your clubcard number right at the end I think from memory. Points post a week or so later.
“This means that you are paying £53.50 for £60 of gift cards plus 360 Avios points” you mean £65?
Correct!
Has there been success with them posting the bonus points to accounts when you order online? I had heard mixed reviews a while back of points not being applied via the giftcard site.
I bought £200 of currys e-gift cards via the website on 26th Oct (£100 *2 transactions). Points posted on clubcard account 6th Nov. However, only recieved 2 x 150 points rather than 4 times. So with hindsight should have put through as 4 x £50. Going to contact clubcard customer service as this isn’t obvious from their T&Cs so going to put case forward for the other points if i could/should have got
Anyone know whats the official story with Airport Angels? I have Airport Angels cards (via the Barclay’s wheeze ) – in fact my latest one was sent to me as recently as September. I am keen to know if they are still valid and if so when they are likely to stop working when the plug is to be pulled.
I am flying next month AGP-LGW-AGP and was hoping to use the lounges. I have had no contact from them or Dragon ( Barclay’s new partner ) but if I log onto my online account its still showing as 6 more visits available..
If you got one via the “wheeze” it’ll stop working as soon as you hit your expiry date Id have thought.
September was when they pulled the plug so you probably got renewed just before the change over date.
Yep they’ll be valid until expiry date. I’m hoping the wheeze ones get renewed to 6 visits with Dragonpass on the 12 month renewal date – but the onus is on ‘hope’ since Barclays closed the loophole to get them free. The other way to get them (see my link above) is still good value @ £13.50 for 6 visits, the current a/c is free and easy to manage online – ie you can turn off the Travel pack insurance as soon as you get the cards.
The official story is available via CPP as they are a quoted company – they have closed it down.
CPP is the company which did deals with all the banks to sell you credit card insurance, insurance which was hugely profitable for banks as the coverage rarely paid out – the majority of what you were insuring against was already covered by your card issuer under UK credit law.
It was such a good earner, CPP offered to run bank credit card activation call centres for free in order to give callers a hard sell on this insurance. Most banks agreed,
With the banks now having to pay compensation to people who bought this insurance, and CPPs relationship with the banks not exactly being great now, their ability to get banks to sell Airport Angel for them was presumably strained.
Correct but that doesn’t affect the validity of existing cards. I’ve got a couple issued 7/15 and I assume B**** would have sent out replacement Dragonpass cards if the AA ones had stopped working (which they haven’t). Might be wrong if B**** had rumbled the wheeze but anybody successfully using an AA card after 16/9 could confirm they’re still working until expiry.
Years ago I signed up for an AA card via a shared Barclays Premier link (I had a regular Barclays account, not Premier but they didn’t spot the difference when I entered my long card number). Every year, I get sent a new card with 6 visits loaded – I last used the card on the 6th of October in Gatwick’s No 1 Lounge with no problem – the card has an expiry of 02/16 printed on it.
Thanks for confirmation.
My son used his AA on the 19th October in Madrid. His expiry is August 2016
I last used my AA on 3 Nov. Fingers crossed to be sent out a new DragonPass card. I had no idea the Barlcays thing had finished so long ago. No infomation was sent out. Shame
I have (and have had for many years) AA card from a qualifying Barclays account. I received a letter and new Dragonpass card from Barclays 2 weeks ago. The letter states that my existing AA card will expire on 29/11/15 and that must use new DP card from then. My AA card expiry date printed on card was 05/16 so looks like this month is Barclays final cut off from AA.
Go to Barclays dedicated dragon pass website and see if you can register – you will quickly see if Barclays have transferred you over to DP or not (you don’t need to know your membership number to be able to register)
https://barclays.dragonpasstraveller.com/portalserver/traveller/index
Yep, got the same letter/new card in the post (though I’m planning to use the app).
Pretty certain anyone trying to use an AA card next month will be turned away at the lounge, regardless of the expiry date.
Thanks. Not surprising the wheeze cardholders didn’t get the letter. Good to know, though.
I had this emailed to me today from airport angels regarding their Barclays’ branded cards .. I know many of us have them via a “wheeze” but it seems as if its come to an end.. There is another thread about this somewhere and I will update that too if I can find it..
Dear Roberto,
Thank you for your email.
Barclays have found a new lounge supplier which will be taking over from Airport Angel. For your new membership card, you will need to contact Dragon Pass on 0333 220 5599.
All AA Barclays memberships will expire on the 29th November – cards will not be valid passed this point.
Barclays are in the process of communicating with all of their customers regarding the provider switch.
I hope this answers your query but please do not hesitate to contact us again if needs be.
Regards
John Gregory | Airport Angel Support
CPP Group Plc – Travel Services
Delivery is £2.95 for orders over £50 and requires a signature on Tesco gift shop
OT MSE showing a Tesco wine code XXLRTY 500 club card points for new and existing customers on a £60 spend – 3500 codes – till Sunday
Nice. Just picked up my wife’s 6 Tesco Grocery wines with the 500 point code that I posted earlier. True enough – it was somewhat targeted as it didn’t work on my a/c or for some other poster here. But it was in generic format ie XX.
btw the wine code, when ordering groceries, also works for those little one glass bottles, worked for me last week – the main issue is the wine tastes awful!
I think this code only works via ‘Tesco Wine by the Case’ and not wine purchased via Tesco Groceries.
Yep 2 different codes, you’re right.
Mine is on a recent BITS, Groceries.
This one is for WBTC.
Thanks Liz, will take a look and try to get it in tomorrow.
correction
ker-ching another 1000 Tesco points plus the extras
easy mistake
2400 Avios plus the extras
Travel in London on Friday 13 November 2015 and, thanks to your contactless MBNA MasterCard®, it won’t cost you a bean.
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Touch in and out to travel in London on the bus, Tube, tram, DLR, London Overground, TfL Rail, Emirates Air Line and most National Rail services using your MBNA MasterCard contactless account (including Apple Pay™) on Friday 13 November 2015, and we’ll refund your fare (up to £27.90).
That should make your commute to work more pleasant… or, if you’re lucky enough to have some time on your hands, why not explore the capital and discover something new?
Small print
MBNA MasterCard contactless – Transport for London – Fare Free Friday:
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15. Promoter: MBNA Limited. Registered Office: Stansfield House, Chester Business Park, Chester CH4 9QQ.
10% off DragonPass purchases over £60 with Nationwide Simply Rewards.
You might need a current a/c to transfer to (say) Halifax for a £150 credit