Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get 500-1,000 bonus Avios or Amex points with £25 Amazon.co.uk gift card purchase

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A fantastic new Amazon offer has been launched by American Express.  It is available for many – but not all – British Airways American Express, Amex Gold and Amex Platinum cardholders.

You will find this offer on the ‘Offers’ tab of your British Airways American Express / Amex Gold / Amex Platinum statement page online, or in the app.

There are a few versions.  You will hopefully see some combination of:

Get 500 / 1,000 Avios / Membership Rewards points when you spend £25 at amazon.co.uk before 17th September using your BA Amex / Amex Gold / Platinum card

It isn’t clear who gets what and you may have got nothing if you are very unlucky.

It is limited to the first 30,000 people to register so I recommend you sign up immediately, although the limit does not seem to have been reached yet.  You have until 17th September to make a purchase and have it post to your Amex account.

There was some confusion over the wording of the offer.  It says “purchases made with Market Place Sellers, Amazon Prime or subscriptions to Amazon Prime” do not count.  Secondary terms and conditions also implied that gift cards would not count, even though American Express has no idea what you bought.

I did a test purchase on my own Amazon account for a £25 gift card.  I AM an Amazon Prime customer.  Within 2 minutes of making the purchase I got an email from American Express saying “Congratulations, you have earned 500 bonus Avios – if your transaction meets the offer terms”.

The 500 bonus Avios have now posted to my account.  See below (click to enlarge):

Amex Amazon screenshot

I have also repeated the process on my wife’s non-Prime account with the same result.

This means:

gift card purchases do count

even Amazon Prime customers still earn the bonus on gift cards

This offer should be a no-brainer for qualifying BA Amex / Amex Gold / Amex Platinum cardholders, especially if you have the 1,000 points version.  £25 is a ludicrously low purchase limit for earning 1,000 Avios or Membership Rewards points.

As I found, purchases of Amazon e-gift cards count.  These can be bought online via this link and added to your personal Amazon account via this page.  The balance is used automatically on your next purchase.

You obviously don’t need to purchase a gift card if you have a £25+ purchase you need to make.  However, to avoid any issues with ‘Market Place sellers’ and the like, the voucher seems the easiest way to go.

Want to earn more points from credit cards? – April 2024 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current 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

You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

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

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

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

15,000 bonus points and 1.5 points for every £1 you spend Read our full review

Earning miles and points from small business cards

If you are a sole trader or run a small company, you may also want to check out these offers:

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

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

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

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

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

For a non-American Express option, we also recommend the Barclaycard Select Cashback card for sole traders and small businesses. It is FREE and you receive 1% cashback on your spending.

Barclaycard Select Cashback Business Credit Card

1% cashback uncapped* on all your business spending (T&C apply) Read our full review

Category

American Express Membership Rewards, British Airways and Avios

Comments (73)

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

  • Andrew says:
    4 Sep4 September 08:53

    Slightly O/T, but I got a targeted offer on the only Amex card that I have not linked onto TfL contactless, for 5% off all travel (contactless) until 30/9/17 (valid every time). Quickly added the offer and added that card to my Oyster account for contactless travel!

    Interestingly the terms of the offer says:

    •Offer is only intended for the targeted recipient of this Offer.

    So Amex must be getting smarter on these being manually added

    • Brasov says:
      4 Sep4 September 22:52

      You didn’t need to add or link anything to make a contactless card work on TFL.

      • Genghis says:
        5 Sep5 September 05:54

        But then you don’t have journey history / refunds etc. Always add your contactless cards to TfL.

      • Rob says:
        5 Sep5 September 10:29

        True – only needs to be linked if you want to be able to view journey history.

  • Ian says:
    4 Sep4 September 09:25

    Amex have increased this offer to 30,000 registrations from the initial 20,000.

    • Rob says:
      4 Sep4 September 10:19

      Very thoughtful of them to let non-HFP readers have a chance.

      • Bill says:
        4 Sep4 September 20:35

        Loooool you kill me Rob

        • Rob says:
          4 Sep4 September 21:20

          25000 unique visitors a day including the email list, multiple Amex cards per reader …. 20000 is not a stretch 🙂

          • Genghis says:
            5 Sep5 September 05:58

            How is the 25k calculated? If I visit the site from my mobile, work PC, mac and iPad is that 4 visits (per device), prob 3 (per IP address)?

          • Rob says:
            5 Sep5 September 10:28

            The 15k which is non-email does, yes, have duplication due to duplicate IP addresses. You can offset that by Twitter and Facebook people who don’t visit the site unless they see something interesting in their feed though. And most casual readers will only visit from one device.

  • Dale says:
    4 Sep4 September 09:42

    Amex rep said to me that I wasn’t included in the offer because I had already taken up a different offer and it wouldn’t be fair on other customers. I let him know my opinion of that approach!

  • Geoff says:
    4 Sep4 September 10:48

    I’ve had the offer put on supplementary cards (both Plat and BA Blue), however, while the offer has ‘triggered’ after £25 ‘proper’ Amazon spend, the points don’t show up on the primary card account.

  • Cate says:
    4 Sep4 September 11:56

    Is the copying of someone else’s code legit? I see you can do it but is there going to be ramifications for this? Amex is a big provider of the means to get free travel, hotels and money off perks. I don’t want to queer my pitch with them. What’s the consensus?

    • Rob says:
      4 Sep4 September 12:34

      I won’t be writing an article on it, put it that way …..

    • TripRep says:
      4 Sep4 September 15:37

      I wouldn’t recommend copying a code from a non-household member. ie only select an offer from another account that you are also a supplementary cardholder on. I want to keep things sweet with Amex, hence why I haven’t shared any offerid numbers on here.

    • Geoff says:
      4 Sep4 September 17:33

      Hi Cate, forgive me, but what does your query mean? (copying others code) – Rob seems to know…but I have no idea, sorry!

      • Cate says:
        4 Sep4 September 19:21

        Nothing to apologize for Geoff but Rob’s word (or lack) is good enough for me.

        • Rob says:
          4 Sep4 September 21:22

          You need to remember that my FCA authorisation curbs what I can write about regarding exploiting loopholes offered by finance companies.

    • Alan says:
      5 Sep5 September 00:13

      The offer code isn’t specific to your Amex card but personally I think we should try and keep things a little opaque rather than posting step by step guides, esp now Amex CS has gone downhill on the adding offers front and it’d be nice to avoid them recoding things to block this quirk of the system…

  • Nick says:
    4 Sep4 September 18:49

    Two hopefully helpful comments to those wondering why they’re not given all the Amex offers.

    First, this kind of marketing offer is normally supported (read: funded) wholly or mostly by the retailer, who will have a ‘target’ customer in mind. Amex will select these customers to serve the offer to, rather than risk opening it up to everyone and annoying the retailer.

    Second, marketing results best practice says that in order to show how effective your offer is, you need a ‘control group’, so some of your ‘selectees’ above will not be served the offer – basically they can then assess the spend by the offer group to see how it performs relative to the control.

    If Amex CS agents give offers out willy-nilly, the retailer gets annoyed, and ‘benefit analysis’ is inhibited.

    So annoying though it is, not every customer can have every offer.

  • Timothy Arnold says:
    4 Sep4 September 21:25

    Hey all,

    Might already have been said but appears that the offer ends on the 17th rather than the 19th as the article suggests. I got 1000 MR offer on the Amex Plat.

    Save to Card to get 1,000 bonus Membership Rewards points on spend of £25+ online at Amazon by 17/09/17

    Spend must be billed to your Card account by 17 September 2017 to be eligible for this offer

  • Brasov says:
    4 Sep4 September 22:54

    So annoying that the people paying high fees for their cards don’t get any priority over the free or quasi-free cards

    • Frenske says:
      4 Sep4 September 23:17

      Then you do it wrong if you cannot get money for value out of the perks of premium cards. Not necessary AmEx will earn more money on BAPP than a normal BA card. If played right one can get a lot more value out BAPP.

    • Alan says:
      5 Sep5 September 00:17

      I do think Amex could offer a more compelling earning rate on the Plat. I like the benefits but put a lot of spend onto other cards not issued by them due to the poor ongoing earning rate.

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