Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Bits: 50% off mytaxi, 18% off LateRooms, 7200 Avios with a tablet

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News in brief:

Get 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.

There is also a separate mytaxi promotion offering 50% off rides after 5pm on Fridays and at weekends, until 3rd September.

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.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Comments (40)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Simon says:

    Still waiting for my Hailo base and bonus points from February last year. Any time now…

  • Pbdj says:

    My reading is that the mytaxi airport promo also applies to cabs /from/ the airports!

  • Roger I* says:

    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.

    • N says:

      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

      • Rob says:

        There is no ‘book here’ – you need to download the app and make a booking, discount is automatic.

        • Roger I* says:

          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.

      • Roger I* says:

        Found it, thanks.

  • the real harry1 says:

    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 🙂

    • Rob says:

      My wife also refuses to take exit row seats because it means her bag has to go up ….

    • roberto says:

      “Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve.”
      P.G. Wodehouse

      • the real harry1 says:

        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.

  • Thomas says:

    One question, I am unsure about. Is this promotion for new customers only? I had an account with mytaxi for quite a while…

  • Simon says:

    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!

    • Ro says:

      Maybe they just aren’t releasing games for actual title contenders only, hence Liverpool is available 😉

    • Rob says:

      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.

      • Ricardo says:

        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!

        • Simon says:

          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.

        • Geoff says:

          Remember – most games listed will likely change date & time due to TV coverage and Europa league.

          • Rob says:

            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.

  • Ro says:

    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.

  • Roger I* says:

    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.

    • Tom says:

      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.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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