HfP EXCLUSIVE: 5,000 bonus Avios with £350 of hotel bookings via Kaligo.com

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• Matt says:

  25 Jan25 January 13:23

  HFP can keep pimping Kaligo as much as they want but most of the HFP community have realised that Kaligo is awful vaule for money.

  At the end of the day I value Avios based on the following. 20K (ish) can get me a UUA from Club to First on a zone 5/6. Also works for WT+ to Club however I always buy Club and UUA to F.
  So based on that I would be willing to spend an extra £250 to earn 20K for a UUA but usually Kaligo, is no where near this reasonable value.

  I haven’t wasted my time with looking at the ‘bonus avios deals’ today because 5K is really not worth the time.

  • Sussex Bantam says:

    25 Jan25 January 13:41

    My usual stop over hotel when I’m in Boston is the Marriott Copley Place.

    I’m next there on the 5 March for a 1 night stay.

    Expedia prices this at £239.93, Hotels.com prices at £240, Kaligo prices at £245 with 1000 Avios. Not a bargain – but certainly not “awful value for money”

    I’m not sure why there is so much vitriol towards Kaligo today – sometimes they are good value for money, sometimes they are not. Raffles points out exactly that in his piece.

    • Matt says:

      25 Jan25 January 13:47

      And how much was it on the hotels website…?

      • Matt says:

        25 Jan25 January 13:49

        As i just checked, the cheapest room on the hotels website for 1 night on 05/03/16 is £209..

        • Sussex Bantam says:

          25 Jan25 January 14:21

          That’s excluding taxes.

          Including taxes it is 342 USD – which I make about £244…

• KB says:

  25 Jan25 January 13:34

  I’ve used Kaligo a number of times, and recently booked 3 hotel stays in Malaysia and South Africa, netting myself 11,800 Avios points (including bonus). I do a quick check against Booking.com and Trivago, and if Kaligo seem uncompetitive, I just book elsewhere.

  I’ve used them a number of times for Warsaw and Budapest and they are in line with other sites.
  My hotel costs get billed to my clients, I get the Avios. Works for me.

• Sohan says:

  25 Jan25 January 14:58

  Hi Rob,

  Just wanted to say thanks very much for running the website. Despite having been a regular email subscriber for a good while, I’ve only recently started checking out the comments.

  I cannot believe how many people moan and groan, or find something to criticise even if the article is telling us about something free.

  I am really grateful for all the work you clearly out into the site, and it has opened my eyes to a lot of great opportunities. Please keep it up!

  • Danny says:

    25 Jan25 January 15:01

    +1 and very well said.

    • Percy says:

      25 Jan25 January 23:42

      Yep, totally agree! Also it’s just common sense. I use Kaligo when they are good value or about the same £ as competitors. It only takes about a minute to check these things…

• Gabriel Nita says:

  25 Jan25 January 16:50

  I suppose the “dirty secret” of Kaligo’s success is just that many are using it to book business-expensed rooms, and don’t care so much about the real value of their tariffs. It’s hard otherwise to recommend a website that 95% of the time is more expensive than the rest – the chance of finding a good deal is so small (never happened in my case) that I don’t even bother now.

  • Rob says:

    25 Jan25 January 17:18

    They’re not, because they can’t issue you with a VAT receipt – so businesses with more than £90k of revenue are at a cost disadvantage by using them.

  • Joe says:

    25 Jan25 January 17:19

    Nail on head!

    • Rob says:

      25 Jan25 January 17:46

      No, as no VAT receipt.

      • Joe says:

        25 Jan25 January 23:09

        No. Not all businesses need to produce VAT receipts to claim VAT back from the Government.

        Also, you’re missing the point of the ‘dirty secret’ which is that employees are using these sites for personal gain, deliberately at the expense of their employers. So if it ends up putting the business at a cost disadvantage, and the business doesn’t question it, then that’s precisely how sites like Kaligo and RocketMiles will flourish, and precisely the point Gabriel is making.

        • Rob says:

          25 Jan25 January 23:41

          No employee will get away with submitting a non-VAT receipt for a hotel more than once.

          The whole frequent flyer / hotel loyalty system is, however, built on the arbitrage of rewarding an employee for how they spend their employers money. It underpins the entire industry. Whilst it may be blatant to book a hotel on Kaligo if it is £10 more than going direct, it is not particularly worse than insisting you stay in a Holiday Inn which is £10 more than the Hampton next door because you need to hit your IHG Accelerate target. Or, indeed, insisting you fly BA ‘because the timings fit my meeting better’ because you need a few tier points despite the ticket being more expensive.

          You’ll be telling me next you don’t agree with buying books of taxi receipts on eBay and submitting fake receipts each time you take the tube to a meeting 🙂

• Andrew H says:

  25 Jan25 January 19:12

  To all those criticising Kaligo: I paid £51 for a London hotel room and got 4000 Avios on signup. That’s good value to me!

• richard says:

  25 Jan25 January 20:29

  I paid £48 for a night at an airport hotel in Dublin and got 5200 avios.

• rad says:

  25 Jan25 January 20:43

  5000 avios on GBP 350 spend – at Raffles’ valuation of 0.6p per Avios, the bonus is worth GBP 30. Going through hotels.com and getting 20% off gives you GBP 70 off on the same spend.

• rad says:

  25 Jan25 January 20:47

  This is what I find annoying – they seem to imply they’re rates are competitive, when most of the time they’re far off:

  FAQ

  How do I know that I’m getting a good rate?

  Rest assured with Kaligo’s price comparison engine!

  • harry says:

    25 Jan25 January 21:05

    But why do so many people here (not all, I hasten to add) seem to want to be spoon-fed the perfect great value saving / points deal without doing any personal research alongside the lead? Then act all disappointed and hood-winked when the value of the deal is not quite as great as they ingenuously ‘believed’?

    It takes a few minutes to google comparative prices.

    Take a bit of personal responsibility, people?

    Stop blaming the messenger? Perhaps blame yourself for not engaging brain for a few minutes?

    • mark2 says:

      25 Jan25 January 23:05

      well said, sir!

    • Joe says:

      25 Jan25 January 23:23

      I don’t think anyone is blaming the messenger, are they?

      And it’s because people are doing their own personal research that they’re calling Kaligo out for being a false economy.

      • Brian says:

        25 Jan25 January 23:56

        So don’t book with Kaligo. End of story! There are enough people posting on here who have found rates on Kaligo that they are perfectly happy to pay, partly or wholly because of the ‘bonus’ Avios. You haven’t, so you should avoid them. There is no need to make it your personal mission to repeat the same point ad nauseum – the HfP readership is generally smart enough to know when they are being ripped off and will do the necessary checks.

        • Joe says:

          27 Jan27 January 00:10

          Perhaps you should have stopped at the end of the story if you don’t like reading the comments.

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