News in brief:
50% off mytaxi in London
The Hailo taxi network has recently been rebranded as mytaxi following its acquisition by Daimler.
In theory mytaxi will be relaunching as an Avios partner soon although I haven’t seen any movement yet. If you previously earned Avios via Hailo then you should still be getting points via mytaxi but new customers are not being allowed to collect.
Whilst you’re waiting for that to happen, try this.
Until 30th September, you will get a 50% discount on black cab rides booked via the mytaxi app to or from:
- London Heathrow
- London City
- London Stansted
- London Gatwick
- London Luton
As there is a fixed fee option of £50 from Zone 1 to Heathrow, this means that – after applying the 50% discount – you can get to Heathrow for just £25. There is no limit to how many discounted rides you can take.
Full details are on their site here.
There is also a separate mytaxi promotion offering 50% off rides after 5pm on Fridays and at weekends, until 3rd September – see here. Thanks to Mark for this.
18% off at LateRooms.com TODAY for their 18th birthday
Discount hotel room site LateRooms.com is 18 today, amazingly. To celebrate, they will be offering 18% off a wide range of hotels for today only.
I haven’t seen a list of the properties included, but if you need to book something at the moment it is worth a quick look. The 18th birthday event is here.
7,200 Avios with a £199 Lenovo tablet
Tesco Direct was offering 3,000 bonus Clubcard points (worth 7,200 Avios or 7,500 Virgin miles) with a £199 Lenovo tablet last week.
Unfortunately they had messed up their website and you couldn’t complete check out unless you ordered two tablets! This has now been fixed but the offer closes today, Monday 14th.
If you’re interested, take a look at this Shopper Points article.
(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
Still waiting for my Hailo base and bonus points from February last year. Any time now…
My reading is that the mytaxi airport promo also applies to cabs /from/ the airports!
Agreed, added.
mytaxi looks interesting for us. 🙂 A couple of comments:
1. Unusually for Rob, there’s no ‘book here’ link, just a link to the T+Cs for this promotion.
2. What’s the definition of ‘London’ : postal district? London borough? within the M25? I would qualify for 2 of the 3. No info on app AFAICS
3. How do I get a fare estimate? I downloaded the app but only see ‘book’.
Thanks.
Fare estimate is buried in the app. Have a click around and you will find it.
If you qualify for a fixed fare then you will get a pop up
There is no ‘book here’ – you need to download the app and make a booking, discount is automatic.
Thanks, Rob.
I’m not ready to book, just lining up the possibility for next week. The app thinks I’m next door 😀 and won’t let me change the pick up address. The app is still calculating the fare from next door to LGW South after 10 minutes. 😀
I think I have found out that their definition of ‘London’ doesn’t include my address. OK, they don’t want me, even though apparently there was a cab 3 minutes away. Not sure whether to keep the app for possible non-London use.
Found it, thanks.
O/T this might raise a wry smile from exit seat aficionados – so my wife checked in @ T-24 and found she had been allocated the coveted (on this plane) 14A – nice to see it happens as sometimes I think the algorithm holds exit seats back until last, hoping for £23 from someone willing to pay, it must mean the plane is full, I guess
anyway, she only goes and immediately moves herself to a window dangerously near the toilet zone! her logic being she likes to have her bag on the floor and the view is not as good over the wing! no point telling her she could have her bag on the floor ten minutes after take-off, that is ‘too much hassle’ – just goes to prove each to their own I suppose but what a squandered gifthorse 🙂
My wife also refuses to take exit row seats because it means her bag has to go up ….
My husband is same if travelling alone.
“Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve.”
P.G. Wodehouse
ha ha!
I do wonder if somehow we have secret ‘status’ – yes I do know what status is, Genghis 🙂 but we’re never going to get it at present, all our flights are Avios redemptions (no tier points) bar a few HBOs.
But we do fly reasonably frequently.
Is it by chance my wife got an exit seat this time and at Easter I got the only window ET seat in a 99% full plane with a blocked off middle?
I do make sure to always input the BAEC numbers in our bookings.
One question, I am unsure about. Is this promotion for new customers only? I had an account with mytaxi for quite a while…
Appears to be open to everyone. The ‘weekends’ discount is all over their Twitter feed for example.
Thank you for letting me know.
Hi Rob, sorry if someone else has already flagged this but the Emirates stadium redemptions have appeared on the Emirates website. Most of the season is there but with some of the bigger games not yet listed (or already snapped up). (Odd that Liverpool is available (and for only 20k miles for the box), for example, when Chelsea, the Manchester teams and Spurs are not.) I will see anyone who goes to the Brighton game in the box!
Maybe they just aren’t releasing games for actual title contenders only, hence Liverpool is available 😉
You’ll be seeing me and my 9-year old daughter then 🙂 Picked up a couple of games this morning due to a reader tip-off. I only take the rubbish opposition because I know there should be a few goals ….
Remember that Amex points transfer instantly into Emirates as long as the accounts are already linked – it is literally instant. Very handy as it lets me pick up Emirates redemptions without having to hoard any miles there. I assume EK is also happy as they are effectively selling the seats for cash!
I am guessing that they are not releasing the other games (yet?). Emirates might feel they can get better corporate ‘value’ by inviting key clients. I think only 4 box seats per game go for miles, the rest tend to be EK invitees.
Could someone kindly clarify how the Skywards website works for these packages? I don’t currently have enough EK miles to book, but will transfer across Amex points if there’s availability for the match I want.
It currently says “Sorry, you don’t have enough Skywards Miles to redeem these tickets.” and in the column under “Number of tickets” has a dash. Does this mean it’s already sold out, or just hidden to those without the necessary miles?
I tried calling Emirates but spent 10 mins trying to explain what I wanted to an agent who didn’t have a clue and couldn’t even find the Arsenal redemptions in their system.
Many thanks in advance!
My understanding is that if you see the dash then there are some seats available – but you just can’t see it as you don’t have the miles. If there’s no availability then that ticket type for that match won’t even be listed. But I have never tested this by seeing a dash and then transferring in the points so it’s only a guess. Sorry. I think you need someone with enough miles to do an availability check for you – sorry but I can’t help.
And Rob, insinuation re rubbish opposition noted! And accepted, to be honest.
Kids want to see goals!
Remember – most games listed will likely change date & time due to TV coverage and Europa league.
Correct. For clarity, you have zero come back in this situation. It is even worse this season as you need to factor in a potential Friday night kick off as well as Sat, Sun and Mon. The TV schedules are only finalised about 8 weeks in advance.
OT – I had 500 MR points for £25 spend at Amazon on my platinum card. The week before the offer I had applied for an received a BAPP but for some reason Amex couldn’t merge the card’s account onto my current online Amex account and as a result I couldn’t access “my offers” so was worried I would miss out on the Amazon offer.
called up today and they immediately merged the account but the Amazon offer was of course not there. I asked the lady at the call centre if it could be added and she said unfortunately not – so instead she just manually added 1000 avios to my account.
On top of that I missed out on a targeted offer of 30k avios sign up bonus by 2 days. So amex said they would manually add the extra 5k avios once i meet the minimum spend to make it 30k total.
talk about amazing customer service – what a result. Just shows that with Amex, it’s always worth asking.
Further to my post at 09:13, I got a mytaxi estimate for a journey from home (actually next door) to LGW. It took 2 1/2 hours. 😀 😀 That’s almost twice as long as their estimate of the journey time.
BUT the estimated fare is £254. Even at 50% off, it’s expensive. Our local cab company will take me for £64 – not a London cab, usually a large Merc – but we know them and use them for LHR and LCY @ £32.
I won’t be making much use of this app.
A similar story. I need to get two of us from Gatwick to Heathrow shortly. The mytaxi price is circa £250, or £125 with the 50% discount applied. Uber fare estimation is £55-£75.
Lenovo tablet can be found easily for £50 less, some really poor customer reviews, so that’s bad value and quality for what will be overpriced Clubland points.
Auto correct -“Clubcard points”
Hi Rob. I tried to transfer some membership rewards to emirates last night and this morning online, on chat and on the phone but there seems to be a problem as it keeps coming back “Rejected by Participant” . Amex and emirates keep telling me it’s not their fault . I don’t suppose you have any advice on how to resolve this as i would like to book the arsenal box before they are all taken?
No, I did it years ago and can’t remember what happened. Such a situation is often due to the need to add additional zeros to the front of the account number, or to remove the first few digits or remove any letters.
Amex shows my Emirates account has having 9 characters, so that means ditching the EK at the front of the number.
Thanks Rob. I asked amex to change it to 9 digits and it looked like the link was (accepted) but when i tried to make the transfer on the phone and online it kept getting rejected by emirates
O/T Random note. I needed to get a flight to Seattle this week and I usually book on VA directly online. Looking at the horrendous pricing to the US, I looked on skyscanner and saw a flight £600 cheaper with Virgin and a direct flight. Looked up the company and it was registered in Dublin, so wasn’t comfortable. So started to book the £2.1k Econ Virgin flight and had a thought, what about Amex Travel. They had the same flight and price, so I couldn’t justify the extra £600 by booking directly, so went for the Amex option. Seems that I’m on a U ticket on the way out and L on the way back. Means I’ve no chance of upgrading on the way out, but could do on the way back. Let’s see.
mytaxi is a horrible App compared to Hailo which was excellent. I used it twice to book cabs to take me to the station to catch a train. On both occasions the driver cancelled the booking about 15 minutes before he was due to collect me. There was no notice other than a text message, which you may well miss first thing in the morning. Check the reviews for the app on the App Store. It’s a nasty app run by a nasty company, which has effectively eliminated a decent competitor in Hailo. I’ve switched to Gett, which is OK so far.
Tried the Mytaxi from Canary Wharf to City Airport on Tuesday morning. Quoted £20 fixed fare. When I got the receipt, I was charged he full £20.
An email to customer services resolved it and I was refunded £10 to my credit card.
Now using it back to Canary Wharf from City, hopefully they have fixed the issue and the discount is automatic…
Just got the email receipt from mytaxi. Automatically included the 50% discount! Bargain price for an airport transfer.
Well just tried to use the offer at Heathrow and twice had my taxi request cancelled despite 50+ black cabs sitting there. The app also drained my battery. Not impressed and couldn’t find any contact details to let them know. Back to uber it is!
Does anyone know when the 50% mytaxi discount is applied? I can get a £50 fixed fare from LHR T5 to SE1, however no discount is every shown.
As per the article, it is applied automatically at the time payment is taken.
Could anyone advise how this will work when arriving into Terminal 5 at LHR.
How does the process work. I book the cab then where do I meet the driver? Does he call me? Has anyone tried going for the 6 seater option?
Thanks for any help, just a bit nervous whether it will be a nightmare process after arriving from long flight.