News in brief:
New InterContinental in Ljubljana now bookable
InterContinental has confirmed the opening of a brand new hotel in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana at the end of the month.
Looking at the pictures on the hotel website the interior looks amazing.
This will probably turn out to be a smart move from InterContinental as Ljubljana lacks major international hotel chains at present. The hotel is located close to the train station and a 10 – 15 minute walk from the old town (photo below).
The InterContinental Ljubljana looks like a very good points redemption. Superior Rooms cost around €225 per night for cash or just 35,000 points. An IHG hotel with £200 rooms would normally be around 50,000 points per night.
Rooms can be booked now for stays from 31st August 2017. The booking page is here.
Primera Air food menu – a joke?
A couple of days ago Rob wrote about the upcoming Primera Air service from Birmingham and London to New York and Boston. The primarily economy service is set to launch in April 2018 and the cheapest tickets include nothing but your seat and 10kg of hand baggage.
As the flight time will require you to eat at some point, you can pre-book one of 11 meal options…
… and pay a fortune.
I’ve never seen a ‘buy on board’ price list that looked anything like this one (click to enlarge):
Let’s just hope that the Premium Fish Meal at £60 looks something like this:
I can’t even begin to imagine what a £30 ‘infant / baby meal’ looks like. The page with all the charges is here.
(Want to earn more hotel points? Click here to see our complete list of promotions from the major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Promos’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.)
About Head for Points
OT: Well I am an idiot and have booked two cash Economy tickets with AA from Kauai to LAX hoping I could upgrade to Business with miles later on.
There’s no availability now so I’m stuck with 32000 useless AA miles off MBNA signup and spending.
Should I keep the card and hope to be able to redeem them in the future via Etihad, for example?
Yeah I know, I should’ve realised upgrades with miles are subject to reward seats availability like BA (and I guess everyone else?)
You can use my case as the perfect opposite example to Liz’s planning skills 🙁
Try calling CS when it gets closer to departure because if they oversell Y you might find they are happy to take your miles for an upgrade if there is any F seats left. At the end of the day the flight’s not that long so no great hardship to sit in Y.
haha i agree. but you’re writing this on a site where people actually pay for club europe! And i’m pretty sure there was a recent article even trying to claim it was worth it hahaha
We’ve been waitlisted. Fingers crossed!
Team hfp. Can I upgrade a flight with avios which I booked into economy via amex travel? Availability showing. Any experience? Do I call BA or Amex Travel? Thank you
Depends which booking class it goes into – only certain sub-categories of ticket can be upgraded. Off the top of my head I don’t know the exact ones but they are on ba.com. It is unlikely that a very cheap economy ticket can be upgraded and in any event you’d need World Traveller Plus availability for Avios redemption which is often tricky to find.
Bottom line, though, is that travel agent tickets can now be upgraded as long as they are in the right booking class.
Thanks rob. Messages crossed. Q, O and G fares are the ones that don’t upgrade.
At the last BAEC devaluation I understood that one of the pluses was that much more cheap booking classes would become uogradeable later that year. Did that ever happen?
Ignore. I resorted to the traditional approach of reading the readily available t and cs rather than the lazy throw out query to the forum.
(No, in my case, because of the booking class O)
These Primera Air meal prices are a total and utter disgrace every bit as deplorable as car hire companies that try to sell you massively expensive 200 Euro insurance policies at the rental desk late at night after the lieing UK car brokers (eg Holiday Autos) told you that the car came with zero excess cover.
If I had my way every single MBA carrying executive who is trained in these disgusting forms of disguised pricing that leads to suckering customers in with unrealistically low prices and then hitting them with numerous unreasonable add on fees that lead to ill will from customers and brown beaten front line staff would all be stripped of their million pound yachts before being rounded up and incarcerated on on Devil’s Island for five years.
Booked the IC Ljubljana last month for a visit in October so pleased to see it’s actually opening…
The only problem is getting there from Manchester, means a trip down the motorway to the wonderful Luton airport, not sure what I’ve done to deserve it but at least the hotel will be a tonic at the end of it!
I really hope the fish dish doesn’t come out like that, it looks horrific poor creature…
And no I’m not a vegetarian.
For a £60 meal, I would expect it to come with a bottle of champagne, three glasses of gin & tonic, four pints of beer, a taxi ride home afterwards and another bloody meal! When transatlantic flights to the same destinations on BA, Virgin, LH etc are actually cheaper at times and come with everything, why the hell would anyone want to fly on that new low budget carrier that will probably go bust and leave everyone stranded anyway? I don’t get it at all.
Sounds about right, unless you live in Birmingham – but even then, Virgin from Manchester is hardly a long way.
OT: Received IHG targeted email today offering 5,000 bonus points for next stay. Clicking through to activate – “you are not eligible for this promotion”. When they emailed me in the first place – bravo.
Textbook IHG and yet another thing telling me not to bother with their rewards club any longer. Hilton and Carlson only now I think.
I had exactly the same! Hopeless.
Same here. When I click through it asks me to enter the promo code! No sign of it anywhere in the email.
I had the same earlier this year and followed it up with CS but they refused to budge. I share your sentiments and have recently closed my IHG account.
Yes, this happened to me too.
A couple of days ago I applied for the IHG (Creation) credit card. For a couple of minutes, the website told me that my application was being considered, but then this stopped, and it went back to the screen before I submitted my application. I then submitted the application again, and it again told me my application was being considered, and this time after two or three minutes I was told that my application had been declined. Today, though, the IHG website is telling me that I have just been upgraded to gold status because I have an IHG credit card.
Will I get the credit card in the mail in a couple of days? Who knows, Neither IHG nor Creation are exactly the best at what they do, I fear.