REMINDER: Get 3,000 Avios or other airline miles with a Heathrow Rewards sign-up bonus

Just in case you are flying out of Heathrow tonight for the Bank Holiday, I thought it was worth a reminder that Heathrow Rewards – the loyalty scheme for Heathrow’s duty free shops – has a sign-up bonus at the moment worth 3,000 points.

3,000 points is a very generous sign-up bonus for Heathrow Rewards.  It is especially generous given the recent 50% and 100% transfer bonuses offered to airline partners or into shopping vouchers.

The minimum spend to trigger the bonus is £150 in a single day before 31st December 2018.

Heathrow Rewards gives you 1 point for every £1 spent in Heathrow (1 per £10 on foreign exchange) or on Heathrow Express tickets (online bookings only). Once you’ve earned 250 points you can exchange them for miles or shopping vouchers.

What is my bonus worth?

You can redeem your 3,000 points for 3,000 Avios or miles in Virgin Flying Club, Aegean Miles+Bonus, Miles & More, Emirates Skywards, Royalskies (Royal Brunei) or Krisflyer (Singapore Airlines).

Alternatively, you could take £30 of Heathrow shopping vouchers or Heathrow Express vouchers, or £60 of vouchers towards the official Heathrow car parks.

As Heathrow Rewards has been offering transfer bonuses recently (in January they offered a 50% bonus on all airline miles transfers) the sign up bonus could be worth 4,500 Avios or other miles if you sit on the points until a transfer bonus turns up.

Full details of the Heathrow Rewards scheme are here.  To get the bonus you need to make sure you add the promotion code BAECAO18 at the bottom of ‘contact information’.  Whilst the code is from the BA website, it doesn’t stop you moving the points to a different airline if you wish.

Check the small print before you make your purchases at Heathrow as some items, such as tobacco or foreign currency transactions do not count.  Gift card purchases do not count if they are for the store where you buy the card – eg M&S gift cards bought in M&S do not count (and a friend recently tried this as a test) but third party gift cards bought in WH Smith seem to be OK (but don’t blame me if it fails).

You may well already have a Heathrow Rewards account.  If so, consider persuading someone who shares a BA or Avios household account with you to open one too.

Note that Heathrow Rewards only seems to allow one account per street address.

If you are flying this weekend, don’t worry about not receiving your plastic card in time.   You can use the Heathrow Airport app to add your Heathrow Rewards card to your smartphone wallet.  Alternatively, save your receipts and scan or post them to Heathrow Rewards and they will add the points manually.

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (September 2021)

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

There are two official British Airways American Express cards. Both have increased sign-up bonuses until 2nd November 2021:

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

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:

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies. This card has a limited time offer of 60,000 Avios when you sign up:

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

(Want to earn more Avios?  Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)