News: Humberside and Birmingham lounge news, new Ryanair domestic routes from Edinburgh

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• Sam Wardill says:

  11 Feb11 February 04:49

  The Clubcard + is also handy to give to my 13yo for bus fares and shopping.

  • Save East Coast Rewards says:

    11 Feb11 February 12:25

    Assuming you collect Avios (or something they convert into like Nectar) then the BA Prepaid Mastercard is better for this use case. With Tesco you get nothing for bus fares (as I don’t know any that are over £8) but BA give an Avios per £2 and they round up so anything over a pound gets an Avios. Tesco don’t round up so £7.99 transaction gets nothing but on the BA card it’d be treated as £8 and get 4 Avios

    • Tom says:

      11 Feb11 February 18:37

      Most non-London buses don’t take Amex so Barclaycard Avios is probably the better card.

    • Chaz says:

      11 Feb11 February 18:39

      But doesn’t the BA mastercard have a £2.99 per month fee?

• Speedbird676 says:

  11 Feb11 February 05:36

  Tesco are discontinuing their Pay+ app but the same functionality has been merged into the Tesco main app.

• BJ says:

  11 Feb11 February 06:28

  A lot of Ryanair 737 MAX are or will be based at EDI. I am again steering clear of these things as it seems to me there have been increasing media reports of issues with some of them over the last few months.

  • Erico1875 says:

    11 Feb11 February 09:20

    Strange how we all differ on attitude to risk . It’s all been retested and retested
    . I risk assess based on how long I’m on it. Most Ryanair routes are under 3 hours so less time for something to go wrong and more airports below to divert to if something did.
    Transatlantic scares me. A lot of ocean between land.
    You would never get me on a TA sailing

    • Catalan says:

      11 Feb11 February 09:40

      To assist your ‘risk assessment’ the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashes occurred 13 minutes and six minutes after take off, respectively

      • Nick says:

        11 Feb11 February 10:32

        I know the rigour of certification and training and am still actively staying well clear of them. They shouldn’t be flying. And I say that having flown on all sorts of weird and wonderful things over the years that plenty of others wouldn’t have done.

        • Dave Brass says:

          11 Feb11 February 10:53

          I work in the production and MRO of aero engines (at a company based in Derby….) and I planned to away for boarding a Max for a bit longer. I said planned, as I ended up on a 737Max without realising it flying with LOT. Slight nerves when I sat down and realised.

          From a passenger point of view, the experience was brilliant. Boeing have brought many elements of their modern wide body fleet across, such as larger bins for bags and the lighting system. The interior felt larger and more spacious so its a win for the passenger experience.

        • Froggee says:

          11 Feb11 February 11:25

          I’d be fascinated on the statistics behind this. My former employer had a policy that we were on no account to travel on single engine planes. One analyst applied this on a site visit where two planes were laid on, one a single engine and the other twin. She got ridiculed by a typically smug fund manager who went on the single engine plane. The single engine plane failed to take off and had to emergency brake at the end of the runway. Fund manager was much less smug. Two trips had to be made in the end, both on the twin engine plane.

          So how many hours of flights logged would you need before you’d prefer to fly on a 737-MAX than a Turbo prop? Or take a chopper?

          I have no answers on this myself. And I have to admit I felt somewhat uncomfortable yesterday on realising family Froggee were about to take off from a windy EDI in a 737-MAX yesterday.

          I tried to tell myself not to be daft given the “statistics” whilst having no clue what they are since the 737-MAX rebranded and relaunched.

        • Bagoly says:

          11 Feb11 February 12:10

          @Dave Brass
          You mean you don’t trust the competition! 🙂

        • Bagoly says:

          11 Feb11 February 12:36

          @Froggee
          I’m appalled at the whole 737Max fiasco – after the two crashes the FAA should have insisted on Boeing starting again from scratch.
          But I feel that even a 737Max is safer than current helicopters – there’s no meaningful redundancy or gliding escape route on the latter – if one blade goes it just falls.
          Octocopters are much more promising.
          In time we may regard a helicopter with less than four horizontal blades as having the same sort of unnecessary inherent risk as the 737MAX.

        • RussellH says:

          11 Feb11 February 13:56

          I Have not followed the 737MAX story in any detail, so shall leave all comments to those who have.

          But I have never fancied a helicopter after an Edinburgh to London train journey back in the early 1970s. Alone in a 1st class compartment until Newcastle, where a bunch of men-in-suits, all older than me got on. For whatever reason, we all got talking. On said that he was a helicopter engineer, but later in the journey admitted to not only never having flown in one, he also had no intention of ever flying in one, unless he was in such a dire situation that there was really no alternative.
          As he put it, “those rotor blades are just held on by one big nut.”
          For some reason. I can still see the scene in my mind’s eye.

        • will says:

          11 Feb11 February 14:27

          Design has inherent flaws, you’d never knowingly design from scratch like that and for that reason I will not fly one out of choice.

          The way Boeing dealt with the aftermath should serve as a lesson to all of us as to quite how far corporate misbehaviour can reach. That’s a polite way of putting it.

        • Novice says:

          11 Feb11 February 22:31

          Agree. I watched a documentary made on the reason why these things happened. It didn’t show boeing in a good light when it comes to caring about lives.

    • IanP says:

      11 Feb11 February 09:43

      The well publicised initial issues with the MAX all occurred during climb out, shortly after take off, so flight length should not be a factor. The long boring bit at cruising altitude is statistically the safest. I take the approach that I don’t want to spend money with someone happy to buy those planes given the scandal over the initial safety issues and how it was approached by Boeing and FAA.

    • Lady London says:

      11 Feb11 February 11:37

      Yeah takeoff period apparently much higher risk next highest risk landing.

      1 each of those even on a 3 minute flight.

      I hope I never set foot on one – hasn’t Ryanair also given the 737Max a different name? so you’d have to be alert, to know

    • Bagoly says:

      11 Feb11 February 12:29

      @Erico1875
      If you are worried about disruption, then time of flight has logic.
      If you are worried about crashing, then that’s something which technological improvement really has made no longer relevant – the last cruise phase major crashes I can remember were due to pilot/intruder suicide (Germanwings, China Eastern, MH370), Russian missile (MH17), mid-air collision (Uberlingen), and disorientation (AF447)

  • Yorkieflyer says:

    11 Feb11 February 14:40

    we flew a Norwegian MAX from Edinburgh transatlantic to Stewart and back before they started dropping out of the sky. I still shiver when I think about it. Having said that I can see from the seating plan that we are due to fly ex EMA on a Ryanair MAX this summer and tbh I’m not really worried as surely they should be safe enough now that they are allowed back in the air. Yes it a crap design fix with inherently unstable aerodynamics and a software fix….HAve they all got extra pitots?

    • Novice says:

      11 Feb11 February 22:45

      You should question that if a company can go as far as boeing did first time for coverups and negligence then how can you be sure they wouldn’t do the same again?

      It should have been scrapped. I’ve travelled a lot over years from a very young age solo touring and never used to care to check planes; only cared about which class I’m sat in but since this mess I find myself checking every flight I take.

  • Rhys says:

    12 Feb12 February 07:55

    If there have been reports of increasing issues on the MAXes I’ve certainly not seen them, and I spend half my day reading aviation news!

• Save East Coast Rewards says:

  11 Feb11 February 08:26

  Headline needs tweaked thanks to the brand confusion they’ve made for themselves.
  Tesco Pay+ IS closing and the functionality being merged into the main app
  Clubcard Pay+ is not closing and that’s what you mistaked for Tesco Pay+ yesterday
  Then there’s also Clubcard+ that apparently also still exists
  I can see why these mistakes are made with such confusing brands.

  • PeteM says:

    11 Feb11 February 09:05

    Tesco marketers should maybe give the names another go, eh?

    • Erico1875 says:

      11 Feb11 February 09:25

      It’s maybe the same marketing people who decided giving away 1000 club card points with a £5 bottle of Tesco Cava all those years ago 😁

• _nate says:

  11 Feb11 February 09:59

  FWIW, I understood from their useless email that the debit card was closing, so I think they should probably stop calling twenty different schemes with incredibly similar names…

  • Save East Coast Rewards says:

    11 Feb11 February 10:23

    I don’t know why they stick Plus on everything. The Tesco pay in store app was originally called PayQwiq but understandably they realised it was a crap name and so it became Tesco Pay +, the debit card was originally just Clubcard Pay and then for some reason later they decided to add a plus to that

    • Lady London says:

      11 Feb11 February 11:39

      …And given they effectively eliminated previously existing benefits like a decent Boost program, Tesco should have actually added a Minus to their program names not a Plus

    • RussellH says:

      11 Feb11 February 14:00

      > I don’t know why they stick Plus on everything.

      Sort of like Job Centre Plus, I suppose. Not Job Centre +, though
      🙂

• Aliks says:

  11 Feb11 February 11:14

  Nice to see there is still life in Humberside Airport (or Kirmington Aerodrome as its better known locally)

• Alex Sm says:

  11 Feb11 February 13:55

  They are closing up Tesco Pay+ app because it will be merged into a new Tesco app. I was setting it up the other day and applications for the Pay+ card were wide open and even advertised. Therefore you article yesterday caused a bit of raised eyebrows…

• David says:

  11 Feb11 February 17:58

  I was not aware that HSBC does not give points to HMRC transactions, which I have credited using Curve and not Tesco Pay+. It is hard to check as they do not list the points on the statements or by each transaction on the website like Amex although I should be able to see as my tax bill was not small, unfortunately,

  I do not think they treat these transactions as cash advances, but will see on my next bill!

  • The Original David says:

    11 Feb11 February 22:00

    Is your HSBC Prem points balance suspiciously zero? I have that too – I’ve used my card for some “unusual” transactions where I wasn’t sure if points would post, but I’ve also used it for some straightforward purchases that should definitely have earned points, but my balance is showing zero at the moment. I reckon there could be a technical problem with HSBC at the moment.

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