Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get 1,250 Avios with a £30 spend at Viking

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The Nectar to Avios (and vice versa) transfer process is now live, as I explain here. If you have 1,600 Nectar points, move them across to Avios to bag the 500 Avios bonus.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight a special offer with office supplies group Viking. The Viking website is here.

Whilst Nectar partners generally do not get too carried away with bonus point offers, this is typical of what we can expect to see going forward.

What is the Viking deal?

As you can see here, Viking is offering 2,000 bonus Nectar points with your first purchase of £30 + VAT after you add your Nectar number to your Viking account

With the exchange rate between Nectar and Avios of 1 : 0.625, these 2,000 Nectar points are worth 1,250 Avios. This is a decent return on £30 + VAT of spending.

As an office supplies group, Viking is an obvious place to pick up your next printer cartridge or similar. It also has a lot of ‘office use but usable domestically’ products, such as coffee capsules and bulk supplies of bottled water.

You need to register your Nectar account by 7th February. There is an implication that you can order later than this but it is not clear.

Viking also has discount codes

There are two other Viking offers at the moment:

  • you save 10% on your first order worth £60 + VAT with code VGB-10NEWUK 
  • you can get a £5 discount code off your next order of £49 + VAT by signing up for the Viking newsletter

These offers cannot be combined. It isn’t clear if they combine with the ‘2,000 Nectar points’ offer as this does not require a promo code to be added.

How many Nectar points do I earn at Viking?

As we covered in our guide to earning Nectar points over the weekend, you earn 2 Nectar points (1.25 Avios) for every £1 of ex-VAT spend.

This doubles to 4 Nectar points per £1 on all own-brand products.

There are bonus point offers too

There are also bonus point offers which would combine with the Nectar offer and money-off deals above. Take a look here.

The current offers include deals on non-office products such as coffee, bottled water and toilet paper!

Conclusion

We won’t be covering every single Nectar promotion run by its core partners, don’t worry! However, I thought this Viking offer gave a good indication of how you could earn Avios from Nectar partners.

The registration deadline for linking your Nectar account to a Viking account to earn the extra 2,000 Nectar points is 7th February. The instructions are here.


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 (43)

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

  • TimM says:

    Unlike Ian McDowall (above) I would never buy disposable batteries – their sale really ought to be illegal by now. However, reams of paper are always useful and are recyclable. 20 reams from Viking come with a bonus 1000 Nectar points, a £5 off first order discount, 2000 Nectar points for linking to Nectar and free delivery. That works out at £2.93 (inc VAT) per 500 ream – a very good price for 80gsm – with 3212 total Nectar points = 2007 Avios for a £58.56 spend. And think of the surprise of the recipient of a ream of paper as a Christmas or birthday present!

    • RussellH says:

      Maybe the sale of disposable batteries ought to be stopped…
      But – the rechargeable ones that I have seen are only 1.2v, while standard ones are 1.5v. In other words, if you have a device that requires four standard batteries, you five rechargeable ones to make it work properly.
      You could only ban standard batteries once anything battery powered is designed to take rechargeables.

      • TimM says:

        Disposable batteries are only nominally 1.5V, they vary quite a lot depending upon their chemistry. They also decline in voltage with use to well under a volt. While NiMH cells are nominally 1.2V – pretty much middle of the disposable battery range, they start at 1.3V-1.4V fully charged and their discharge curve is relatively flat c.f. disposable batteries. Hence anything that works with disposable batteries, will work with rechargeables. So disposable batteries could be banned today.

        • Peter K says:

          Maybe I should try rechargable batteries again, but when I used them before they drained much faster than the equivalent sized disposable ones.

          Fine with a wall mounted clock potentially, not good with a high drain device outside of your home.

  • mark2 says:

    I have still got a big colour laser printer from when I had a business. I checked the price of a toner cartridge CC532A. It was £75.05 on Amazon and £118.19 on Viking, making them expensive Nectar points.

    • RussellH says:

      That does not surprise me – I do not think I ever bought laser cartridges from Viking. Nor, for that matter from Amazon.
      There always seemed to be much cheaper places out there, though if I bought two cartridges at once, the chance of the supplier still being there next time I needed to buy was very small.

  • cinereus says:

    Just over tenner worth of Nectar for £36 of overpriced Viking stuff. I can see it being value for some people but it won’t be for most.

    • Chrisasaurus says:

      Used to have a list of all the prefixes you could switch the codes for at Viking for better pricing – assume they’re handling that in a less antiquated fashion now and that it doesn’t work that way. But when it did, prices were OK – not great but OK

  • Simon Barlow says:

    Apologies if this has been raised before, but as someone with no nectar points, can I take advantage of this offer and when the nectar points post, transfer to AVIOS for the bonus?
    TIA

    • AJA says:

      You have 3 weeks until 14 Feb 2021 to do your first transfer of 1600 nectar points over to Avios. So sign up for Nectar and go shopping. I don’t know how long it takes for you to start getting the bonus nectar point offers as I’ve had the card for years. But I am pretty sure spending each week in Sainsbury’s will start triggering the offers. Otherwise if you have an Amex MR card transfer MR at 1 to 1 over to Nectar so transfer 1600 MR to Nectar and then do the transfer to Avios.

    • Chrisasaurus says:

      You can but you will be spending more than £5 premium for the points by spending doing £30 at Viking…

  • Dezeeko says:

    I think you can Simon. I had the same idea too and opened an account but as several others have said, I am finding it difficult to find offers that offer sufficient value for me. But I think you need to do the maths to see if it makes sense for you.

  • Delbert says:

    Other than TimM’s excellent advice on ordering 20 reams of 80gsm paper, which I can’t justify as I’ll never get through them in the near future or be able to sell them or indeed store them, then the Viking deal is a no go. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

    It was worth a try, though.

  • Tarmohamed says:

    The only thing I use Viking for is office chairs. They’re sub £200 each and good quality. The sub £100 argos chairs don’t last.

  • AndyS says:

    Do these offers work for personal accounts rather than business? I know from the website the newsletter subscription one is only for business accounts so wondered if the rest were as well

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

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