What you missed on Head for Points last week
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Welcome to the Head for Points weekly newsletter, full of the latest Avios, travel loyalty and travel credit card news, hints and tips.
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The latest travel and aviation news:
Hilton’s new hotel in Mallorca is now open.
Accor has relaunched Accor STEPS, which gets you extra benefits at its luxury hotels when you book via a ‘preferred partner’ travel agent such as our partner Emyr Thomas. Click to see what you get.
British Airways news:
British Airways is not selling any short-haul tickets from Heathrow for today (Saturday) and this may continue into next week. It is too close to hitting the imposed airport passenger cap and also needs to preserve seats for passenger whose flights will be cancelled at short notice.
A new Gatwick to Cape Town route was announced.
The Turks & Caico flight will move from Gatwick, where it was tagged onto the Antigua service, to Heathrow. It will now be tagged onto flights to The Bahamas.
Grenada flights will now be tagged onto Antigua flights on Sundays.
Avios news:
EXCLUSIVE: We have an exclusive offer for HfP readers of 3,000 Avios when they get the new British Airways Prepaid Mastercard. Click here to find out more. You need to use our promo code to apply.
What is best hotel loyalty programme if you intend to convert your points into Avios? You’ll need to spend between $2,700 and $5,500 to earn 10,000 Avios, depending on chain.
You can earn 4 Avios per £1 spent at Bicester Village until the end of August.
If you’re in the Terminal 5 Galleries South lounge before 2nd August, you could win one of ten prizes of 100,000 Avios.
Credit card news:
Is there any point having the free British Airways American Express card? If you have one of these cards, you really should be asking yourself why.
American Express Platinum now comes with £300 of dining credit (ie £300 of free meals!) each year. We do the maths on whether this makes The Platinum Card annual card fee good value.
Hotel news:
Marriott Bonvoy has released seats for another batch of O2 concerts in London, in their VIP suite.
What does Fans of M.O. (Mandarin Oriental’s hotel loyalty programme) offer you when you stay?
Radisson is offering decent value ‘Park, Dream and Fly’ packages at Heathrow and other hotels at UK airports. You can get a room and up to 15 days parking for a fixed price.
LAST CALL: today (Sunday) is your last chance to register for instant IHG Platinum status plus a simple challenge to get 18 months of Diamond.
Other interesting articles:
Enterprise Rent A Car has an excellent deal running at the moment for one-way car rentals in France. We sent Rhys to France to try it out (image above) – here is his report of three days sightseeing from Paris Orly to Bordeaux.
Rob flew to New York on an Aer Lingus A321LR. This is a single aisle aircraft – the same one you’d use to fly to Europe, but with extra fuel tanks so it can reach the US. What was it like in Business Class? Find out here.
Arsenal football tickets, VIP and standard, are available for the new season for Emirates Skywards miles (which also means with American Express Membership Rewards points, if you convert them).
Emirates also has some VIP tickets for the BMW PGA golf available for miles.
A reader reviewed IHG’s brand new Regent Phu Quoc resort in Vietnam – the first time we’ve ever reviewed a Regent Hotel since IHG acquired the brand.
Deals you missed:
During last week, British Airways launched new flights to Grenada (see here), Cape Town (see here) and Turks & Caicos (see here). For the first 24 hours or so they were wide open for Business Class Avios redemption availability, and most seats went to our readers. You may still find seats available in other cabins.
See you next Saturday!
