News: £120 American Express discount on Qantas, we’ve made some HfP forum tweaks

News in brief:

American Express launches a £120 Qantas discount

If you are looking for flights to Australia and don’t fancy the Singapore Airlines business class deal we covered yesterday, Qantas has launched a cashback deal with American Express.

One upside of using Qantas is that, if you take the 17 hour non-stop flight from London Heathrow to Darwin (and, when it reopens, Perth), you are guaranteed to avoid any covid restrictions on the way. If your flight has a stopover, there is a risk of losing your holiday if new restrictions are imposed in your transit country.

You will also earn Avios and British Airways tier points on Qantas, of course, although Qatar Airways and Malaysia Airlines, amongst others, do so too.

If you are targetted for the offer, it will appears on your account page on the Amex website or app. You need to click ‘Save to Card’ before purchasing.

Here is the small print in summary:

• get £120 cashback when you spend £800
• must book by 8th March
• flights must depart from the UK

Tweaks to the HfP forum

If you’ve not checked out our forum yet (the index is here), you should. Since launching in December, we’ve had over 1,400 topics started and over 11,500 replies posted. Importantly, virtually all questions posted in the forum have been answered in some way.

During Wednesday, we are rolling out some display changes.

The overall aim has been to reduce the amount of scrolling required. This means:

• we have made avatars smaller because, for one- or two-line replies on laptops, the avatar was the key driver of how much space the reply took up

• we have reduced the line spacing on forum posts – the main site (ie this article) has generous line spacing but a forum does not necessarily need so much

• we have reduced the font size on quoted text – as well as saving space, this should make quotes easier to filter out in your mind when reading replies

• some other bits of ‘padding’ have been removed

We have also made one other change. The ‘Recent Topics’ tab is now paginated, and extends to 25 threads. This will reduce the time you spend flicking between pages of threads.

You will also find that if you are on ‘Recent Topics’ and click to a thread, you can now back-space to ‘Recent Topics’ without being diverted to the main forum index.

For most people – unless you interested in solely in one area such as British Airways – ‘Recent Topics’ is the best way to navigate the forum.

We are aware of ongoing issues with a captcha being served to a handful of people when trying to quote a post. We are trying to fix this but it is more complex than we originally thought.

The next wave of updates will focus on additional functionality.

As always, let us have any feedback in the ‘Housekeeping’ thread.