Bits: 3000 American Airlines miles at Ramada / Days Inn, Cathay at Gatwick, buy cheap Melia points

News in brief:

3,000 American Airlines miles per Ramada or Days Inn stay

I don’t cover Wyndham Rewards, the loyalty scheme for Ramada and Days Inn, much on HFP.  I did write this overview here if you want to learn more.

Despite this, there are a fair number of Ramada and Days Inn hotels across the UK and many are pretty cheap.

Outside the South East, sub-£30 prices at Days Inn hotels on off-peak dates can be found.  This makes this promotion interesting.

Wyndham will give you 3,000 bonus American Airlines miles, on top of your base miles, for your next five stays at any Wyndham hotel.

This means that you can earn a maximum of 15,000 bonus AA miles.

There are no minimum stay requirements.  You have until 29th February to book and until 7th March to complete your stay.

Even better, according to the small print, you can get credit for up to three rooms per stay.  You could book three rooms at the same cheap Days Inn, check in for all three and get bonus miles for them all.

At a suitably cheap hotel (eg daysinn.co.uk has Days Inn Chesterfield is £21.25 on 20th December) you would be paying around 0.6p per AA mile.  Not bad!

You can register for the promotion here – don’t forget to set your Wyndham Rewards account to ‘earning AA miles’ as well.

Cathay Pacific launches Gatwick to Hong Kong – a new Avios redemption option

Cathay Pacific has announced a new ‘four flights a week’ service to Hong Kong from Gatwick.  This is in addition to the existing services from Heathrow and Manchester.  From September 2016, it will mean Cathay is operating 43 weekly flights from the UK.

Cathay will be using a brand new Airbus A350 on the route, configured with Business Class, Premium Economy and Economy.  You can find out more on the Cathay website.

As a oneworld alliance member, you can redeem Avios points on this route.  Availability should be pretty good as Cathay is known for being generous in opening up space on non-prime routes.

Remember that BA charges ‘peak day’ pricing every day for partner airlines, which means you will need fewer Avios if you book the British Airways service on an off-peak day.  For peak day travel, however, I don’t see why you would bother with BA unless you had an British Airways American Express 2-4-1 voucher to burn.  Cathay is generally seen as a superior airline in every respect.

If you live outside London, it is worth looking at redeeming on Cathay services from mainland Europe – assuming you can connect from your local airport – due to the HUGE tax savings.  Here is an example I wrote about on the Dusseldorf service.