EXCLUSIVE: No more Avios from Tesco Clubcard

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• Jack says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:19

  Living in Ireland, the Tesco direct deals used to be fantastic. You could buy as many printer cartridges as you wanted from Tesco direct but still return them in store over here without losing the Clubcard points. You also usually ended up making a profit too because the price was higher in Euro than Sterling.

  Also earned 1 point per euro spent here on my Clubcard making the earning fete a bit more attractive.

  • Genghis says:

    12 Oct12 October 08:26

    Of course, how could I forget. The printer cartridges offer!

    • BJ says:

      12 Oct12 October 08:32

      Uppermost in my mind for all the wrong reasons is @Shoestrings wild turkey chase! At least I had a lot of fun trying to make it work 🙂

      • Anna says:

        12 Oct12 October 08:59

        I was just wondering if he’ll make an apprearance on this thread!

• Scott says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:22

  I’ll be losing at least 70-100k Avios a year when this ends.
  Might not be a lot to some people (4 x long haul to LAX as a GCH in xxx cabin?), but if I’m shopping there anyway, it’s all an added bonus at the end of the day, and it does save me £££ on flights (especially when it can be £300-£500 return from MAN-LHR when not booked far in advance). Easy to grab the Avios at a day’s notice as well should a great redemption deal come up.
  Practically pays for a Cathay Pacific First class flight from the US to Hong Kong 😉

  More Tesco stores near me than any other supermarket so convenient.

• MikeL says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:26

  I’ve had some great flights with BA thanks to Tesco but all good things must come to an end at some point. I have 400k Avios and 4 companion vouchers in the travel bank but with little or no international travel on the horizon, I’ve not been adding to the Avios pot recently. I have around £400 in Tesco vouchers so it looks like they might be converted via royal Caribbean (if and when they start cruising again ) or they’ll go some way towards a nice Tag watch via Goldsmiths for my wife‘s Xmas.

• Kate Last says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:37

  While totally unrealistic, it would be amazing if Ocado will suddenly launch a partnership together with M&S

• JK says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:38

  This may the end of collecting Avios for me. Tesco and Amex intro bonuses were two of my main Avios contributors. Now I just have the BA Amex cards. I used to get enough to take the family away in Club or First with the 2-4-1 vouchers, but I don’t think I’ll generate enough anymore. Charges have crept up to £3k for a First redemption to USA. I might be better off getting sale cash fares or even on another airline.

• Blenz101 says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:40

  It’s a shame to see it go but I can see why. Of all the redemptions I would put good money on it that Avios was the most widely abused.

  The value that the partnership brought to Tesco is highly questionable especially if they were handing over millions a year to BA/Avios.

  They are known to mine the clubcard data extensively and my strong suspicion would be that redemptions for Avios are primarily being made by those with disproportionality high clubcard point balances which have been earned not through loyalty on a weekly shop but through other avenues. Surely this would be a factor in assessing the value of the partnership.

  With a Tesco debit card I still find it pretty easy to hit the quarterly cap on earning points and I am pretty sure I am not alone. I can see why this is unsustainable and why Tesco would want to focus on up front discounting of groceries to retain market share as well as rewarding shoppers with a discounted Pizza Express or similar once a quarter. Quite a different proposition to subsidising long haul flights in premium cabins.

  Also, the RFS scheme isn’t simple enough to explain to a typical supermarket shopper when you need to factor in converting CC points to Avios, active exec club account, domestic connections, peak and off peak dates, paying taxes vs. using Avios to offset, use of RFS on selected long haul etc. Without a typical supermarket spend being seen to have value in terms of collecting and saving points for Avios it is left to those who understand the system and work it to their advantage.

  If another supermarket or department store takes on the partnership they would surely be subject to the same lack of loyalty but cash out of the door to the airline.

  • Crafty says:

    12 Oct12 October 08:44

    What’s your main source of Tesco Bank points?

    • Blenz101 says:

      12 Oct12 October 08:53

      Anything which accepts a debit card and allows you to withdraw the cash again in a reasonable time.

      Just the same routes that have been hinted at and covered here many times in relation to fronting a transaction with a Curve card and a credit card sat behind it. I just don’t both with Curve and earn directly on the debit card, with sufficiently large transactions I can earn substantial points per week.

      My pension provider and general investment account both process with points. If I paid UK tax then I am pretty sure that would work as well as I believe it classes as government services.

  • Andrew says:

    12 Oct12 October 09:47

    I think you’re over-egging the impact of frequent fliers on the scheme. There have been several other lucrative redemptions including jewelry and even cars!

    • Rob says:

      12 Oct12 October 10:05

      The number of people in this thread saying ‘no need to shop at Tesco now’ tells you all you need to know about the value to Tesco of Avios.

      In fact, my biggest issue with a Waitrose tie-up (if it happens) is that their is already overlap of the customer base. Does Waitrose really gain much?

      • Andrew says:

        12 Oct12 October 11:58

        My point was that compared to the influence of, say, MSE the impact of frequent fliers and HFP on Tesco is pretty small. Because all of the bonus offers have dried up it’s been a few years since I used to go out of my way to shop in Tesco. For me at least the avios earned now are simply a small bonus on top of what I would have been buying anyway.

        Unless ludicrously generous no new avios tie up is going to get me to shift my supermarket shopping appreciably unless it’s to a supermarket at a similar price point to Tesco. Much as I like and do use Waitrose it is noticeably more expensive which would dwarf any avios earned.

      • Nathan says:

        12 Oct12 October 13:44

        Is there any correlation between these people and the [insert issue] ‘not going to fly BA again’ people?

      • vol says:

        13 Oct13 October 05:34

        I guess Tesco would have weighed this up – there are plenty of folks who shop and don’t really care about the points or use the points solely for redeeming against their shopping bill. Maybe they’re concentrating on the latter now.

    • Blenz101 says:

      12 Oct12 October 11:57

      Goldsmiths remains if you want jewelry but it has a similar problem to Avios. People not loyal to Tesco are able to rack up huge amounts of points and redeem for aspirational pieces, in many cases selling them on for cash.

      Instead of seats in J or F in this instance Tesco are subsidising Tags and Rolex. Plenty of research on the demographics these items attracts i.e. south east bias, management/director roles and male. The exact same issue with fit as BA Exec club.

      Perhaps it still works because there are enough redemptions for high margin fashion jewelry for Goldsmiths though.

      I don’t want any of the options to disappear but I can see why theme park tickets, casual dining and cinema redemptions (all of which offer a good chance of additional spend) would be the bedrock of the scheme for the average Tesco shopper.

• Charles says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:45

  Anyone concerned about avios being devalued, sold off or folded up completely? Not looking good at BA these days…

  • Rhys says:

    12 Oct12 October 08:57

    There’s no way Avios will be sold off or folded. Look at what is happening at Air Canada with Aeroplan. The fact is, loyalty schemes are incredibly valuable to airlines, especially during downturns.

  • Rob says:

    12 Oct12 October 08:58

    Avios is having a record year. No redemptions and all the cash from partners keeps coming.

• Tim Farrell says:

  12 Oct12 October 08:45

  Back in 2013 or 2014, Tesco was running an offer on video game preorders: spend £5 to preorder the game and get 500 Clubcard points. You didn’t even need to buy the game once it came out.

  So I rocked up at my nearest Tesco Extra. I think there were 20 games in the deal, but they only had 12 of them. So into the basket they went and – feeling quite embarrassed – I headed to the self scan.

  Big mistake: the self scan threw up all sorts of error codes so the self scan assistant came to take a look.

  Now this guy clearly knew something was up: why was I preordering 12 different games? It wasn’t normal behaviour. I eventually told him that I was a big gamer which seemed to satisfy him and I got my free Clubcard points.

  The next day, there was a notice next to the video games: preorders can only be bought at a staffed checkout.

  Then there’s the story about those 3V cards which didn’t support 3Dsecure and were a pain to use. I seem to recall laundering them via NS&I.

  Or the huge shipments of old ink cartridges from eBay and having to write my details on the envelopes hundreds of times…

  • Jimmy says:

    12 Oct12 October 09:29

    That was great! I brought loads, I did get strange looks – but I just said I was part of a gaming club which seemed to work. Had no idea what that even meant!

    Had no plans to use them except when it came to launch – CEX were paying over face value – I think it was like £4 over the sale price. So I tootled off, brought stacks and sold them to cex. Paid to shop – literally! :).

  • Blenz101 says:

    12 Oct12 October 12:11

    As we are on the subject of other supermarkets today. 3V were also valuable from Morrisons when they ran their fuelsaver offer. Was something like 1p off a litre for each £10 spent on gift cards. It was possible to launder them via NS&I or pay off Sainsburys credit cards directly.

    A £1 off per litre voucher would generally sell on eBay for £80+. Living in the north and the time there were plenty of Morrisons to clear out and generate multiple vouchers. I was making several thousand pounds a month at the peak of the 3v fun. Plus getting nectar points to boot.

    Morrisons at least the self checkouts accepted 3V so you didn’t have any explaining to do!

    • Ghosty says:

      12 Oct12 October 12:36

      Travelling to support my local league 2 football team away my route was never A to B but rather a zigzag pattern to visit as many Tesco’s and Morrisons on route for 3v cards. Had to leave home early though. Morrison’s petrol coupons meant the travel costs were practically free (£70 tank full for £1.xx)

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