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British Airways launches extra flights to Cape Town, St Lucia and Cancun

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By an amazing coincidence, one day after Virgin Atlantic announced its new route to Cape Town, British Airways has announced an extra Cape Town service.

There will be an additional two flights per week from London Gatwick to Cape Town, starting on 10th January.

This takes the number of weekly British Airways flights from London to Cape Town to 19, on top of the 14 BA flights to Johannesburg and the three weekly services to Durban.

This is not necessarily overkill, because Cape Town was a route also served by Thomas Cook before its demise.  It is possible that both BA and Virgin can make a success of their flights, although the lack of full fare Business Class traffic – as opposed to leisure travellers in flat beds on £1,750 sale deals – may prove to be an issue.

British Airways also announced two other frequency increases yesterday:

St Lucia gains an additional flight on Wednesday and Saturday.  No dates were given, but the implication is that the service will simply continue to operate nine times per week when the Summer timetable ends in October, rather than dropping down to seven as it does usually.

Cancun gains an additional weekly service, on Sundays, from 6th December.  This will take the number of weekly flights up to six.

Both of these routes operate from London Gatwick.

It isn’t clear where the aircraft are coming from to operate these new services.  BA has some flexibility due to the arrival of additional A350 and Boeing 777 aircraft and the ability to flex the retirement of the Boeing 747 and older Boeing 777 fleet.

PS.  If you missed it, take a look at our recent article on the top 10 reasons why I think you should get a British Airways Premium Plus American Express credit card.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous 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

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

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

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

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

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, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

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

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

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

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

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

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

Comments (135)

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

  • Grant says:

    OT – Marriott Bonus

    The additional 50% bonus points have finally landed in both mine and my wife’s accounts following our transfers during the pre-Christmas offer. It took a few calls to Marriott to get it sorted but there never seemed to be any question over whether we were eligible for the bonus.

    Neither of us received the email about the offer at the time.

    • Munch says:

      Is there no point in contacting Amex? Do I just need to go straight to Marriott? What date did you complete the Amex transfers?

      • Grant says:

        Transfers were done on / around 10th November. Amex will tell you that Marriott are responsible for providing the 50% bonus on the transfer so they can’t do anything. If you call Marriott CS ask them to raise a ticket so the back office staff can look at it. They are slow but eventually your points should be deposited.

    • Harry T says:

      @Grant
      Excellent news, thank you. I will ask Marriott.

  • AndyGWP says:

    OT – Anyone know why there is currently a block redeeming miles for Virgin Atlantic LHR-HAV flights? Here’s what they sent me:
    “We are currently unable to use miles to purhase upgrade flights to and from Havana. This is a system restriction on our side”

    No joy checking Vflyer and Flyertalk to see if this is temporary, or when it might start to work. Seatspy doesnt have it as a route option either so I can’t set an alert (aware the route doesnt shift from Gatwick until early summer though).

    • Andrew says:

      Someone’s noticed that a US Citizen can earn Virgin points?

      Points hosted on US servers?

    • paulm says:

      I think there has been a lot of restrictions to do with tickets to Havana since they started using the same system as delta a few years back

      • memesweeper says:

        Correct. I have no idea what the back-end hack is that makes it possible to keep flying to Havana, as the front-end IT basically can’t deal with it at all…

    • Andy_CF says:

      They’ve just changed the operating aircraft and operating days for the LHR-HAV flights in the last day or so, so that might be why they were restricting reward redemption?? Aircraft change from A330 to 787, and the saturday service (VS147) has just been changed to a Sunday (at least from november 2020 anyway).

  • CaptainAnonymous says:

    My Amex gold offer: Spend £800 get 400 points. Excuse me while I contain my uncontrollable excitement.

  • Nigel says:

    For me the Amex offer was spend £1,600 to get 1,500 points.

    • Rhys says:

      Far more reasonable!

    • Tom says:

      Spend £6,100 to get 1,500 points for me! Crazy!

    • Kathy says:

      I got spend £3600 to get 1500 points – which isn’t going to happen.

      Now, I have had a couple of unusually-high spend months recently because I bought my annual train ticket, a new computer, and then booked a couple of flights for my holiday in September – but given that the only time I hit more than £3k in a month is when I bought the annual train ticket, and otherwise my spend per month hovers around the £500 to £600 mark, they’ve got to be having a laugh.

  • Benilyn says:

    To add, will that HSBC account give me an IBAN. I am trying to send money from US to this account.

    • Rob says:

      I have a HSBC Euro account, opened here, and it’s been fine. No interest but does the job.

      • The Original David says:

        HSBC shafts you on the exchange rate though. I had one, tried it for a few transactions and was losing something stupid like 5% per conversion. Back to Revolut for me…

        • Alex M says:

          Were you able to wire transfer USD from US to revolut? If so – could you pls share how – I tried to send money after selling US shares but Fidelity insisted the account should be in my name (not the case with revolut, where it is in their name)?

        • Benilyn says:

          @Alex M – I use Fidelity Net Benefits. I transferred to my Revolut USd acct no issues, takes a week or two to verify the account, then I did a test $10 transfer and it worked fine. I just put in my IBAN and SWIFT.

          @The Original David: By that do you mean, if I have USD in my HSBC USD Account, when I want to move it to GBP, they give you a rubbish rate? On their website it says “Live exchange rates
          With live rates updated by the second during market hours, we’ll provide you with our most up-to-date foreign exchange rate available when sending money.” – this does not necessarily say spot rates, so I could get hammered. I can’t find an online link to the published rates, but trying to send money from my GBP current account to USD, it is showing a rate of 1.2543 vs 1.3031 spot, meaning 3.75%! That is mad…. urgh… I am just scared to put in so much into Revolut in case they block account.

        • the_real_a says:

          Yes – i transfer from a UK held HSBC account (USD) to Revolut in USD using the IBAN. I think £6 fee.

  • Pat says:

    I got the 1500Mr point bonus offer on £1600 spend on my Plt

  • Andy says:

    Hi,

    I made the rookie error of opening a Virgin Atlantic credit card back in July and doing all my spending on it a while back – assuming that either a flying club account would be opened automatically or the points would be stored until I withdrew them into an account. Having finally bothered to check yesterday I realised there’s no points balance, no mention of having qualified for the sign up bonus and no flying club associated with the account.

    Are all of the points ‘earned’ gone for good at this point

  • Rui N. says:

    1500MR for £5100. Ah ah ah. Maybe they made a mistake, and it was supposed to be the other way around?!

    • Lady London says:

      🙂 Good one.

      On these pathetic offers I think the last thing I’d do is spend on them. A dog will only make the minimum effort to get the biscuit. Why teach them that you’ll participate for such low rewards? I think I’d defo not increase my spend.

    • Martin says:

      Exactly the same for me – no thank you.

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

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