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News: £100 off easyJet Holidays, Amex Business bonus issues, WH Smith to replace Dixons?

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News in brief:

Save £100 on easyJet Holidays

easyJet Holidays is offering a rare discount.

You can save £100 off a booking for £1,000+ made by Sunday 16th May.

Travel must be completed by 31st October.

Bookings must be made directly at easyJet Holidays via this page. You need to add code MAN100 at the bottom of the ‘Holiday Extras’ page.

Whilst the code was aimed at Manchester Airport users, hence the MAN100 code, it works from any UK departure airport.

Did you apply for Amex Business Gold or Platinum during the recent promotion?

The recent American Express promotion on Business Gold and Business Platinum was a big success with our readers. It offered 50,000 Membership Rewards points for getting Business Gold and 100,000 points – the UK’s biggest credit card bonus ever – for getting Business Platinum.

It seems that a small number of readers who applied in the final couple of days are being impacted by an IT issue. If you applied before midnight on the 9th April but did not get immediate acceptance, getting approval on 10th April or later, your account may mistakenly be set up to pay you the standard bonus.

American Express has confirmed to us in writing that anyone who applied by close of play on 9th April will receive the higher bonus, irrespective of their acceptance date.

If you find that you receive the standard bonuses:

  • 20,000 points on Business Gold when you hit £3,000
  • 40,000 points on Business Platinum when you hit £6,000

….. then keep spending until you hit the higher targets for this offer (£5,000 in 90 days on Business Gold or £10,000 in 90 days on Business Platinum) and then contact Amex to request an adjustment. The call centre has been briefed about this issue.

WH Smith to replace Dixons Travel?

Dixons Travel is no more, as we reported last week.

Parent company Dixons Carphone has decided to close all 35 sites, primarily found in UK airports, after the Government banned tax free shopping. Given that the chain made £20m profit per year pre-covid, it clearly took a very dim view of the future.

It seems that WH Smith may fill some of the gaps.

WH Smith paid £155 million in 2018 to buy InMotion. Whilst describing itself as ‘the world’s largest airport electronics retailers’, it only has three stores outside the United States. Only one of these is in the UK, in Leeds Bradford Airport.

WH Smith CEO Carl Cowling said in a trading statement last week that he saw a good opportunity to replace Dixons Travel in UK airports. InMotion looks like it focuses on smaller ticket items (headphones, cameras, portable speakers) as well as travel gear such as backpacks, so don’t expect to see the range of computers that Dixons Travel stocked.

Comments (29)

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

  • jp123 says:

    My application was being ‘considered’ past the bonus deadline.
    I’ve received a random ‘10,000 Avios’ bonus on my Business Platinum having spent just 2k of the 10k required for 100,000 MR points. It’s gone through at 10k MR. There’s no tracker for the larger bonus.. should I get in touch, or wait until I’ve spent my 10k target?

    • Rob says:

      No, this 10k is something else. Amex is giving it at random to people and it isn’t clear why – especially on non-Avios cards!

      • Rob says:

        I didn’t, and then over the weekend we managed to destroy a laptop which now needs replacing!

  • mutley says:

    Many years ago as a Student in the 1980’s I worked for WH Smith at Heathrow mostly at weekends, but sometimes during the week, their brand was named Sky shops ( blue and yellow logo), In 1984 we started selling IT and tech mostly commodore 64 and BBC computer etc. We had shops airside and land side at Terminal 2 and 3 and also on the top of Queens Buildings serving the AV geeks model Planes etc. Happy memories of whiling away time looking over LHR with sneaky pint under the counter.

    Also back in T2/3 got to meet some ‘celebrities’ of the time some very nice and some @rseholes.

  • Johnny5a says:

    The Gold 90 days – £5 spend target, when does the clock start ticking? the day of application or the day of acceptance? As I had to go through a secondary screening which involved a phone call.

    • Rob says:

      You’ll see the date once you register the card online as there will be a spend tracker.

  • Bobajob says:

    Thanks for the heads-up, Rob on the Business AmEx issue. We’ll keep an eye out for this as we were finally approved earlier today despite originally applying on 8th April. Problems with e-mails being sent and not arriving plus a series of missed calls to clarify the issue over correspondence address (home) versus business registered address (accountant) obviously took quite a while to resolve. Does the spend requirement kick in from the application date or the application approval date?

    • Rob says:

      No idea, you’ll find out soon enough …. can’t believe it took a month to approve you. We got approved immediately and HfP doesn’t even legally exist ….

      • Bobajob says:

        I was seriously beginning to think they didn’t want our business (and we do legally exist!).

  • Fk says:

    Have the amex gold business and got a 30k bonus but not 50k, when I called last week, I was told it takes 90 days to post….

    Will give another ring later

    • Rob says:

      That’s a lie.

      • Mark says:

        One that they’re sticking to. Works for me atm as I was planning to keep it to refer my partner in 2 months abs the referrals are worth the fee but not ideal for some. Rob are you able to get a statement from Amex about this?

        • Rob says:

          I’ve got a statement from Amex about it, that’s why I wrote the article.

          “We are working to remediate this but in the meantime, we would advise that if a reader applied on/before the 9th but has been given the standard bonus amount only should contact us and will be awarded the correct amount.”

          • Mark says:

            Sorry I meant the line ‘bonus isn’t paid until you’ve held the cards 90 days regardless of when the spend is made’

          • Rob says:

            You’ve had your bonus. You’ve just had the wrong one.

            90 days is just a cop-out for Amex so they can kick the can down the road for their IT errors. No-one has ever had a bonus post after 90 days.

  • Mark says:

    No platinum bonus here yet. Had the card for 2 months and spent about £15K

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

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