British Airways Executive Club has launched a new hotel booking partnership with Trip.com, and there is a decent launch offer.
You might not be familiar with Trip.com but it is owned by the giant Chinese travel group Ctrip, the company which was happy to casually drop £1.4 billion to buy Skyscanner 18 months ago.
You can check out the Trip.com British Airways page here.
Trip.com has just launched PointsPLUS, a new reward scheme which lets you earn airline miles with every booking. At present, the airlines participating are the Avios ones (Vueling, Aer Lingus, BA, Iberia, Meridiana) as well as Air Asia, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles (HK$22 = 3 miles) and Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer ($1 = 1 mile). Full details on PointsPlus are here.
What do I earn?
The standard Avios earning rate will be 3 Avios per €2 spent. However, as an opening offer you will receive 6 Avios per €2 spent.
Here are the terms:
Book by 31st July 2018
Stay by 30th September 2018
Avios will be received six weeks after check-out
Avios earned are based on the price before taxes and fees
Surname of lead guest must match surname on Avios account
Given the current exchange rate, and adjusting for UK VAT, a £100 UK hotel booking would earn around 270 Avios.
But remember ….
Like Kaligo.com, PointsHound, Hotels.com, Expedia, Rocketmiles etc, hotel bookings made via Trip.com will be treated as third party bookings. This means that you will not earn hotel loyalty points and – with the exception of Marriott bookings – you will not receive any status benefits you are due.
(We do not know at the moment if the Marriott policy of respecting status benefits on third party bookings will survive when the merged SPG / Marriott Rewards scheme launches in August. My personal view is that they would be crazy to let this continue.)
This offer works best if you are booking a hotel which is independent, where you do not have status or where you do not care about their loyalty points.
You can find out more about the Trip.com / Avios partnership here.
PS. Kaligo.com has also just launched a new Avios hotel booking offer for larger spenders – details tomorrow ….
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for the latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios from current offers and promotions.)
About Head for Points
trip.com has a very bad reputation… better search for reviews on trip.com before you book with them.
Sample size of one, but I used them for a hotel booking a month or so ago as they were much cheaper than the other OTAs. Worked fine.
Basically when things go wrong they will be of little help, but usually things go right
And things can go wrong even when booking direct or with more reputable places, so it’s hard to generalise
On this note, I have just booked a Holiday Inn in New York via Booking.com where they stated breakfast was included (5 nights x 3 people). Contacted the hotel to check my booking and they have said there is no breakfast on that booking. No response from Booking.com.
So, on this sample size, Booking.com don;t appear to be any better than Trip.com
Surely you could just have your breakfast then and approach booking.com for the cost? Quite likely they will be able to sort it out with the hotel.
I have just returned from New York and when I was looking at hotels none of them included breakfast even the big chains did not include it but you paid an lot extra for it to be included. I could pick up breakfast for two quite cheaply. I used a travel agent and well worth using her, as she could get cheaper prices than anywhere.
Also avoid The Edison Hotel at Times Square its Awful, the rooms are dated and noisy.
Tips are and additional 18-20% on top of the bill before tax and this comes through as a separate transaction on you card, Curve worked well everywhere.
If you want a decent brunch and bagels try Sadelles at 463 West Broadway
Dinner go to Loring Place at 21 West 8 Street
Using Curve in May in NYC, I had multiple different ways of accounting of tips:
1) Tips going through as a separate transaction and not affecting transaction
2) Cancelling the original food amount and then putting through the full amount including tips.
3) Putting through a new transactions food+ tips and not cancelling the one without the tips (supposedly these would have naturally cancelled within a few days but I wasn’t too sure. Curve sorted it out straight away for me after I prompted them).
So my advice is to do a proper review of what you’re charged.
Phoned them last night and said tha tthe offering of breakfast was a “mistake in the listing”. Offered me the choice of paying $15 per person per night for breakfast or to cancel. I opted to cancel.
I’m glad I contacted the hotel to check my booking. Really don’t want the hassle at check-in.
Lesson learned. Don’t think I’ll bother with Booking.com again as you can’t really trust them.
# and they said that the offering……
While I seldom use them, I never had any issues with Ctrip, both with flights and hotels. In some instances they have much better prices than anyone, though in my experience it is rather uncommon. However they are absolutely trustworthy, like any major Western agency.
There seems to offer for BAPP too, for upto 20000 bonus Avios for spending £1000 on hotel booking via Kaligo.com
Once the introductory bonus is over, booking.com at 4 avios per GBP is a little higher.
https://www.avios.com/us/en_us/collect/booking-com
See my post above regarding Booking.com. I advise anyone that has booked with Booking.com to check their booking with the hotel and, when it doesn’t match, don’t expect any assistance from Booking.com.
Disappointing to see know Premium Economy notion in booking pages in web version. Is it the same it the app? This is a pretty basic fail in 2018.
Sorry autocorrect…. NO premium economy OPTION
Premium Economy? I’m really confused but how’s that connected with the Trip.com offer?
I have a stack of flights in China coming up soon. They were all booked through trip.com at extremely good prices and paid for on Amex in GBP. Given the comments above, I hope it all goes well . . .
Anyway, looking on the trip.com hotel booking pages, I can’t see any place to enter my Executive Club account number. I did a trial booking all the way down to “confirm the payment” – but could see nothing apart from a field for Promo codes.
I have just returned from China and booked 4 internal flights and a train with CTrip prior to leaving UK and found it a lot cheaper than Expedia etc, extremely easy to book, once you have booked they have all your details for further bookings, passport etc, there were cancellation options and all went to plan.
Based on my experience they are highly recommended
I think booking.com offer 4:1 avios if you go via the BA shopping portal. So would give you more points per pound that way!
Remember that the BA shopping portal is a topic not for discussion on HFP!
IHG Ambassador benefits are also given on paid third-party bookings.