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What you missed on Head for Points last week

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Welcome to our first weekly newsletter.

One new service we are offering with our relaunch is a weekly newsletter, aimed primarily at people who want to keep in touch but, frankly, not on a daily basis.

Whilst we encourage you to sign up to our daily emails so that you don’t miss out on any short-notice deals or offers, we hope this summary is useful. It will also run on the site every Saturday.

You can sign up via any of the ‘Subscribe’ buttons on the site.

We are still getting to grips with how to format emails for our new system. We know this one looks a bit messy, but we promise it will improve for next Saturday.

This week, the key news was some big changes to the Virgin Flying Club credit card vouchers, along with a world first – the issuance of tier points on REDEMPTION flights!

…… which means you’ll now be able to redeem your 2 for 1 or upgrade vouchers in Premium and Upper, regardless of your Virgin Flying Club status. You can read our review of the Virgin Atlantic Reward Plus credit card here (15,000 miles bonus). The review of the free Reward card is here.

This week’s top offers:

TAP Air Portugal is still offering a status match from British Airways. You can get Star Alliance Gold status (which includes lounge access) by matching your BA Silver or Gold card.

There is also an good dinner, bed and breakfast offer at the Hotel Indigo Kensington if you’re interested in having a London staycation.

Latest travel corridors update

On Thursday, the UK Government announced an update to its travel corridors where no quarantine is required on your return to the UK. The bad news is that Austria, Croatia and Trinidad & Tobago now require 14 days self-isolation.

More positively, Portugal has been removed from the quarantine list.

easyJet confirmed it will be pulling out of Stansted, Southend and Newcastle on 31st August.

American Express changes

This week marked the end of the extended Amex sign-up bonus period, which was increased from three to six months in May. To qualify for a sign up bonus you must now spend the necessary amount in three months.

The good news is that you can now redeem your Membership Rewards for statement credit at a rate of 0.9p per point if you hold a Business Gold card. Rob does the maths in this article.

My Favourite Hotel review: LUX* Grande Gaube, Mauritius

Lux Grand Glaube Mauritius

Our latest reader review, by Alicia, is of the mid-range LUX* resort in Mauritius. A great value choice for families. You can read the full review here.

The British Airways bit

Whilst most airlines have been slow to offer refunds, BA Holidays have been too quick! Two readers said they would have preferred to have been rebooked at a later date rather than being refunded without asking, given how much prices have shot up. One reader was facing an extra £8,000 bill to rebook his cancelled holiday.

Since we published our article, BA Holidays got in touch to offer us an update on the situation. You can see what they had to say here.

Hotel news and offers

Offers you missed:

This 300,000 Avios ISA, pension and general investment offer with Nutmeg ended on Friday.

The bit at the end

And finally, in case you hadn’t already noticed (!) Head for Points has a whole new look. On Tuesday, we launched our new website – you can see everything that has changed in this article here.

We also have a noise-free thread in case you are experiencing technical issues. Please let us know if you spot any bugs. We have put together a list of tweaks to iron out over the next couple of weeks.

Category

General

Comments (18)

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

  • BJ says:
    22 Aug22 August 06:39

    Hmmm not sure what to think to be honest. I get why you did it but I guess I feel it’s not particularly satisfying extra work for you to try and meet the needs of ‘how many?’ at the expense of readers who follow most days who miss out on a potentially more interesting article to make way for it. I’m not convinced it is all that difficult for occasional visitors to scroll through recent articles and find something of interest to themselves; do they really need to be spoon-fed a weekly summary? I’m not really sure who takes daily email articles, do these people often visit the site too or only rarely? If the latter is true then perhaps a separate weekly email subscription service comprising only this article (with links to the full articles on the site) might also be popular amongst the subgroup you are trying to reach and at the same time free up the space again for articles for regular readers? Not really strong opinions, just some thoughts. Will be interesting to read what others have to say.

    • Rhys says:
      22 Aug22 August 08:40

      There IS a new weekly newsletter – and this is it! We thought we’d also publish it as an additional article on the in case anyone wants a quick overview of the past week.

    • Rob says:
      22 Aug22 August 08:56

      It is a 4th article. The usual 3 still exist.

  • The Savage Squirrel says:
    22 Aug22 August 07:14

    The article does seem redundant. It suffers from the issue of being out of date as soon as it’s published as it doesn’t feature that day’s articles, so even if you only come to th site every Saturday morning it’s still no good to you. I’d tend to agree that a weekly Email itself may have a (small) niche but don’t understand what the article adds – unless it’s just that google likes more page updates and internal links?

  • Mr(s) Entitled says:
    22 Aug22 August 07:20

    I would concur that this should be updated to reflect today’s (Saturday’s) articles to ensure it is current. As a concept however, I like it and could see how it would benefit a subset of users. If it’s not for you, simply jog on.

  • Ali M says:
    22 Aug22 August 08:17

    I think this is a good update.People who remain up to speed every day can…

    not read ?🤪

  • Robert says:
    22 Aug22 August 08:40

    This type of ‘weekly summary’ is very useful for me as some weeks I don’t get time or chance to scroll through your site. Here I can see at a glance if I’ve missed anything I want to see. Keep up the good work HfP thanks.

  • TripRep says:
    22 Aug22 August 08:56

    I think this is a good idea, maybe issue on a Sunday and also include articles from that day?

    • ADS says:
      22 Aug22 August 11:21

      A friend who does something similar (on a finance site) moved his from Saturday lunchtime to Friday evening, so that he could have weekends to himself – so I really doubt Rob/Rhys will want to do extra work on a Saturday (to issue Sunday) !

      btw, I sometimes read the weekly summary on another travel site, so I can see how this could be useful for occasional readers.

  • Leo says:
    22 Aug22 August 09:54

    Yes I think this is a great idea – Rob I confess I don’t read every day now – it’s not you it’s me, so this is brilliant. Frankly if you are reading all the articles everyday this catch-up isn’t designed for you in the first place…

  • Peter North says:
    22 Aug22 August 11:49

    I think its a great idea too, I tend to go through the articles a couple of times a week, there should also be post of the week, and best laugh of the week, etc.

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

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