Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

IT’S BACK: Get £20 for free if you have a Monese account (only 4 minutes needed)

Links on Head for Points may support the site by paying a commission.  See here for all partner links.

It’s back!  Monese ran this offer a couple of weeks ago and it has returned.  You can buy a £100 gift card – for Amazon or other retailers – for £80.  A lot of readers took advantage but a lot more missed it when the codes ran out.  I recommend you jump in ASAP.  

How the Monese gift card promo works

Monese is the online banking app which has a partnership with Avios – albeit that the partnership has not gone much further, so far, than letting you view your Avios balance alongside your financial balance.

I know that 2,000 HFP readers have a Monese account following our recent “Win 1 million Avios” competition.  If you didn’t win, here is £20 as compensation.

If you don’t already have a Monese account, you can use my refer-a-friend code of ROBE820.  You will receive a £5 credit plus a further £15 when you’ve spent £500 on your card.  (I think that is how it works – it doesn’t actually tell me anywhere what you get!)

If you are reading this on your phone, the download link is here.

How to get your free £20

Monese is letting you buy a £100 shopping gift card for £80.

By far the easiest option is to buy an Amazon gift card and add it to your Amazon account for future use (it is valid for 10 years!).

Here is a step by step guide to how to do it.  As you can see from the time stamps on the screenshots, it only took me four minutes to buy and redeem each gift card – and it would have been quicker if I wasn’t taking and uploading screenshots.

Step 1:  Make sure you have £80 in your Monese account

I withdrew £80 from my linked HSBC account and it arrived instantly:

You must load the £80 before you add the promo code below, otherwise you will get an error message.

Monese gift card promotion

Step 2:  Go to ‘Promotions’, which is under the menu in the top left corner (the ‘head’ icon)

Step 3:  Add the code HNY100:

Monese gift card promotion

…. which will lead you to this screen:

Monese gift card promotion

Step 4:  Click on your messages (the ‘bell’ in the top right corner)

You can then activate your gift card:

Ignore the £70 reference in the image below which is from November.  Your screenshot will show you paid £80.

Monese gift card promotion

Step 5:  Choose the gift card you want

You can choose from Amazon, Argos, Asda, Caffe Nero, Cineworld, Costa, Currys ….. and that is just A-C!  For an easy life, take an Amazon gift card (valid for 10 years):

Monese gift card promotion

Step 6:  Click here to go to the page of the amazon.co.uk where you redeem electronic gift cards

Enter your code:

Monese gift card promotion

And that’s it.  £20 saved.

I hope the free £20 makes up for not winning our Monese competition.  I also hope this works for you if you missed out in November.

If you’re not already a Monese account holder, you can download the app here.


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

18,000 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:

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

Comments (68)

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

  • ali says:

    Anyone know if this is valid for new accounts?

  • Shoestring says:

    Monese has a very active user base compared to Curve, hein?

  • Martin Pelant says:

    Sold out

  • Richard Shakeshaft says:

    Sold out, apparently…

    • Shoestring says:

      which is why the early bird gets the worm! I’ll get me coat

      • aston100 says:

        Hah, if only I’d thought to use my debit card instead of waiting forever for bank transfer.

        • Shoestring says:

          leave the balance there, could come back into availability and nothing to lose by waiting 48hrs

          HNY – it’s only 30th December

  • Eli gold says:

    It’s already saying sold out

  • Wally1976 says:

    Dammit, transferred the cash in as fast as I could from First Direct when I got the Twitter notification but too late by the time it got there! (Couldn’t use Curve or debit card as maxed out for the month). 🙁

  • Shoestring says:

    has our life come to this? – too much family pressure, too much interaction with people, too much in the way of talking to distant relations?

    that our best alternative is looking for a free £20 on Monese?

  • BJ says:

    Hilarious, £20 transforms a quiet day on HFP into a feeding frenzy. The blog should be renamed ‘anything for nothing’ to better reflect the readership 🙂

    • Shoestring says:

      you’ll be feeding the snob

      • BJ says:

        It’s sort of fun and infectious though. Never used to bother about such things but it all started with getting free flights and upgrades. Now I feel really disappointed if I miss out on something like this but still find it funny at the same time. I guess it is akin to a gambler getting as much excitement out of losing as winning.

        • Harry T says:

          @BJ getting a deal is addictive, regardless of the amount you save, I reckon.

    • aston100 says:

      It is funny because the attitude and posting remarks from several people on this site smack of privilege and condescendence, and indeed the site owner has been known to make unfavourable remarks such as one regarding hotels in Manchester when questioned about spending something like £160 for a night’s stay in that city. And yet, an opportunity to save £20 comes along and they’re all biting and clawing their way to the front of the scrum like any other blue collar person!

      • BJ says:

        That’s part of it but the mindset and behaviour is obviously much more complex than that. For me the points and miles is all just a challenge and I understand that. I don’t quite understand how the rest crept in. At the moment I’m sitting on a stack of Morrisons vouchers…but then is there anyone who doesn’t like saving money on gas? Amazon too, but I keep getting them despite having no plans to spend the things! Usually pass these discounts on to my family to benefit from.

      • Rob says:

        You fail to understand the dynamic of the site. Our average reader, and the data is remarkably similar whether we pull it via Facebook, our email list or visitors to the site, is a London-based male 30-40 years old, degree educated and earning £70,000+.

        There is a smaller group, scattered across the UK, who provided most of the comments and are primarily focused on maximising cheap personal travel, and are also interested in other similar schemes.

        There are other niches inside this (we have a disproportionate amount of SME readers, and a disproportionate amount of people who charge six- and seven-figure sums annually to their credit cards for personal or business use) but the split above is the main one.

        The people who book the big ad campaigns with us are, unsurprisingly, keener to reach the former rather than the latter and in general we act accordingly, but we like to mix it up when we can so there is something for everyone.

        • Harry T says:

          To be fair, it’s clear in the site biography that the target demographic is the aforementioned affluent Londoner.

        • BJ says:

          The question though, taking these Monese offers as an example, is which of these groups is proportionately most interested in such offers? I would be reasonably confident it is more likely to be the London group than blue collar workers from Yorkshire or Scotland. I grew up amongst blue collar workers and still maintain close contact with many. The vast majority would look down on others who went to such lengths to save a pound. In my experience such people are always quick to share what they have, be it offering around their fag packet or buying a round at the pub. By contrast, during my 30s and most of my 40s spent in London I found that first group you mentioned to be much less generous. Failure to share fags and buy a round was common, yet they were quick to deride Yorkshiremen and Scots for being tight. I would also hazard a guess that most HFP readers outside that London group, and particularly in the North, have higher education, income, disposable income, and equity than you suspect.

          • aston100 says:

            Hey don’t spoil the fantasy.

          • bazza says:

            You’re not wrong!

            Never seen “tightness” anywhere like you see from the well paid London boys.

            Just look at the Amex Shop Small, scrabbling all over London to top of their Oyster cards – even offer the shop keeper a fiver to top up multiple cards – beggars honestly!

        • Brasov says:

          Can you explain more about pulling data from Facebook?

          • Rob says:

            If you have a Facebook page you can see the demographic data of the people who like it. Doesn’t have salary data, to be fair.

            If I look at HFP Twitter, the biggest household income segment of our followers is $150,000 – $199,000, with $75,000 – $99,000 in 2nd place and $124,000 – $150,000 in 3rd place. 73% are male. 81% are interested in ‘Premium Brands’ and that is the top special interest segment. O2 is the most popular mobile network.

          • Fenny says:

            People who use FB are happy to give away their personal details. Most will give DoB, location, employer etc. And FB pass all that on to anyone who wants it!

        • Shoestring says:

          People move into retirement/ transition

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

The UK's biggest frequent flyer website uses cookies, which you can block via your browser settings. Continuing implies your consent to this policy. Our privacy policy is here.