Bits: visit the McLaren factory with Hilton, SPG to American 30% bonus, Vueling sale

News in brief:

Visit the McLaren-Honda factory with Hilton Honors

On Monday, Hilton Honors ran another of its occasional ‘behind the scenes’ tours of the McLaren-Honda factory at the Norman Foster-designed McLaren Technology Centre in Woking.

A photo from the day is below.  Amusingly, at least half the attendees were Head for Points readers who had redeemed their Hilton points for tickets after reading about it here.

Hilton is running another trip in November.  The date is Monday 13th November.  The cost is 75,000 Hilton Honors points for two people.

The factory is not normally open to the public so this is a rare opportunity to take a look inside.

The last two times I wrote about this offer, HFP readers had bought the available packages by 9am.  If you are interested in this – there are six packages still available at the time of writing – do not hang around.

You can redeem your points for a pair of tickets here.

Get a 20%-30% bonus on SPG transfers to American Airlines

American Airlines is offering a 20% – 30% bonus when you convert your Starwood Preferred Guest points into AAdvantage.

Full details are on the American Airlines site here.  This is valid for transfers made up to 15th October.

You receive a 20% bonus on ALL transfers into American, with an additional 10,000 AA miles earned if you convert across the equivalent of 100,000 American miles.

The sweet spot conversion is therefore 80,000 Starwood points. This would get you 100,000 American miles (due to the 25% bonus on conversions of 20,000 points) and the base 20% bonus added by American and trigger the additional 10,000 miles. This is the only way to get the full 30% bonus.

However, it is NOT worth converting 80,000 Starwood points to AA under this offer because a Marriott Travel Package would be a better deal. As you can see here, 80,000 Starwood points get you 240,000 Marriott points. If you can get that up to 250,000 Marriott points, you’d receive 100,000 American miles plus a 7-night Marriott hotel stay at a Category 1-5 hotel.

I’m not going to discuss the pros and cons of whether you should or should not collect AA miles today. You get the same award availability as Avios offers across oneworld partners, with the added benefits of Etihad Guest as a partner and no fuel surcharges on American transatlantic flights. Some routes are massively cheaper in terms of miles needed, eg London to Australia, whilst others are not.

Unless you have a very large number of Starwood points, however, this is unlikely to influence you.  What you SHOULD consider, before taking advantage of this, is whether you’d get a better deal converting from Marriott Rewards. Starwood points convert at 1:3 into Marriott Rewards points. Marriott has different conversion rates to American based on the number of points transferred, so it worth checking what you would get going via that route. As I showed above, the Marriott route is a better deal for converting 80,000 SPG points. For small amounts, this promo should be better.  You can trigger an airline transfer of SPG points from this page of spg.com.

Vueling flash sale – today only

Vueling, BA’s low-cost sister airline, is running a two-day flash sale which ends today.

Flights from the UK start at £23.  Vueling operates from many UK regional airports to a variety of destinations, primarily Barcelona, Alicante and Rome but there are others.

You need to book today for travel between 18th October and 20th March.  Full details of the sale are here.