NEW: Earn 2.5 Avios per £1 when you pay for Qatar Airways tickets via bank transfer

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• Rick says:

  17 Feb17 February 09:28

  Perhaps you can benefit from both S75 and the additional avios if you’re able to use the ‘hold my fare’ for 72 hours option. As i presume you could pay the hold price by credit card, which will effectively as a deposit toward to the flight ticket.

  • Nick says:

    17 Feb17 February 11:34

    If it’s handled in the same way as BA’s, this won’t work. The hold fee is processed as an EMDS, which is refunded if you then book the flight, for which you pay in full. So legally you’re paying for a holding service at that point, not a flight (or deposit for one), a service which is being provided as described.

    It would work with any equivalent to BA Holidays offering payment in instalments, which deducts payments incrementally from the total balance.

    • The real Swiss Tony says:

      17 Feb17 February 12:15

      BA seems to be the outlier here in refunding the hold fee. From the QR website:

      ‘Hold my booking’ fees collected are non-refundable and it will not be deducted from the price of the ticket(s).

      However I suspect the argument would be that you’re paying for the hold, not the flight.

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    17 Feb17 February 12:13

    But what is the cost of the hold?

    If it’s less than the £100 s75 minimum it’s not going to work.

    • Nick says:

      17 Feb17 February 12:58

      It wouldn’t even if the hold were £100, because the service you’re paying for has been delivered as described. If later there were a problem with the flight you couldn’t claim S75 on the basis that you paid a hold fee on credit card – the only thing you’d potentially be able to claim for is if the airline didn’t let you book the flight as held.

      You don’t need to spend £100 on a credit card for S75 to apply, just for the total bill to be that much. If you pay £999 on debit card and £1 on a credit card, you’re fully covered.

• sayling says:

  17 Feb17 February 09:36

  I’m a little surprised to see that you use bank transfers for HMRC payments, Rob. At the very least, I would have thought you use CoT and/or Curve…

• Alex G says:

  17 Feb17 February 10:11

  Glad to see most people on here aware of the benefits of S75 protection. I hope Rob’s wider readership are equally aware, because I really think it is irresponsible to even suggest to people that they consider giving up S75 protection when buying something as expensive as an airline ticket.

  I’ve used S75 a few times over the years. The most memorable occasion was in 2012 when I had booked a weekend in Budapest, flying out with Malev and staying at the Hilton. The hotel was a non-refundable rate.

  Three weeks before our trip, Malev went bust.

  The flights had been paid for with a Halifax MC, the hotel was paid for with a Hilton (Barclays) card. My travel insurance included Scheduled Airline Failure.

  I initially claimed for the flights from Halifax, and tried to make an insurance claim for the hotel. The insurance claim was declined, as they said their SAF cover did not cover consequential loss (making it pretty useless cover).

  Until then, I had not been aware that S75 covered consequential loss, but after some research I went back to Halifax and claimed for the cost of the hotel which had been paid for using the Hilton/Barclays card. Halifax paid up without any argument.

  Now I don’t expect Qatar are going to go out of business anytime soon, but if they mess around with your flight times or cancel a flight and you suffer consequential losses, then the credit card company is on the hook for those consequential losses.

  So please, don’t be tempted by this offer.

  (Incidentally, I never did get to Budapest.)

  • JDB says:

    17 Feb17 February 10:26

    @Alex G – s75 is particularly useful when dealing with either tinpot airlines or ones effectively outside the jurisdiction of UK courts but card providers only become potentially liable for consequential losses if they flow directly from a breach of contract or misrepresentation which often isn’t the case. Such protection also only applies if you don’t unintentionally break the debtor creditor link which people forget.

    You will also find that since 2012, as more and more people have discovered s75 that providers have got far, far tougher on assessing such claims. Unfortunately, as anyone can observe in published FOS decisions, there are so many rubbish and/or vexatious s75 that it has made it much harder for good cases to be heard. Providers pay s75 claims out of their own pockets, so they are quite careful. As with any money type claim, really good clear presentation and documentation counts for a lot.

    • Alex G says:

      17 Feb17 February 11:08

      I don’t think Malev was a tinpot airline. It was the national carrier, a member of the One World Alliance, and flew for 68 years. Even great airlines go bust.

      When a flight is cancelled because the airline goes into administration, it is a clear breach of contract (and the credit card company is a party to that contract), and consequential losses kick in.

    • NFH says:

      17 Feb17 February 18:20

      It’s not accurate to say that “Providers pay s75 claims out of their own pockets“. Card issuers are entitled under Section 75(2) to be indemnified by the merchant. Only if the merchant has gone out of business does the card issuer have to swallow the loss.

      • JDB says:

        17 Feb17 February 18:53

        You have missed the first phrase of the paragraph, and the standard practice. Suppliers don’t reject chargebacks only to get hit by the money being taken off them. s75 claims are worn by the card companies.

  • Lee D says:

    25 Feb25 February 09:43

    ^Apples and oranges, and an example of a how outliers always exist.

    Better comparo is versus paying on debit card (yes, a huge number of people pay this way), which is not in scope for s75.

    If I’m a debit card user and can benefit from 2.5x rewards on a flight purchase then this is an easy free kick.

• Gabi says:

  17 Feb17 February 13:37

  Maybe to note that right now you get 15x RevPoints (converts to 15 Avios or Flying Blue miles) per £1 spent via Revolut (I have Revolut Ultra – not sure if this is exclusive). Also for Cathay it’s currently 20x and for Virgin Atlantic also 20x. There is a limit of £2500 spend per month via Revolut Shops, but this is still a very nice 50k bonus points. In the past I also got 20x on Qatar, so this varies. It’s also on top of the 1xRevPoint per £1 spend given to Ultra customers, so in reality these deals are 16x/21x points. At 1p per point that’s 20%! Yes, Revolut Ultra is expensive, but you can very very quickly earn your money back in points, then you have WeWork, Insurance, FT, 3GB a month worldwide mobile data etc completely free and unlimited foreign spend at 0%. Maybe it’s worth a revisit article of its own?

  • Lee says:

    22 Feb22 February 07:53

    Great spot Gabi, I’m on Revolut Premium and will be using this to buy my Qatar Airways flights from now on (for as long as it lasts). Thanks

• RogerWilco says:

  17 Feb17 February 15:23

  Bank transfer = no chargeback & no consumer protection liability of the issuer bank (in the EU)
  So definitely a big no-no.

• Charlie T. says:

  17 Feb17 February 20:48

  Anyone else here just a little queasy with the suggestion that it’s somehow acceptable to pay £10 for a “hold my flight fee” and then benefit from S75 on a (for example) some first first class tickets costing £20k paid by bank transfer that the card issuer neither has any idea about nor sees the economic benefit of processing the payment for (interchange fee, possibility of charging interest). Appreciate that others have said that this isn’t how S75 works anyway, but the partial payment on a card and the rest on cash combo (which people frequently use when e.g. buying cars) seems fundamentally unfair on the card issuer who are effectively writing default insurance in large, unknown quantities without being paid any premium for it. And that by making such arrangements, and making outsize claims on this basis the people doing this massively incentivise said issuers to screw the rest of us, either by campaigning to roll back S75 legislation, or through higher charges (or more pertinently less valuable perks such as Avios earn rates) on the rest of the portfolio to make up for it, or even just deciding that returns on the UK market aren’t worth the bother and withdrawing their products. My $0.02.

  • John says:

    18 Feb18 February 01:45

    The legislation is what it is – you can do whatever feels right to you but someone else will take advantage

• Will says:

  22 Feb22 February 13:33

  It isn’t allowing me to select United Kingdom as the location for the bank – is it not available in the UK?

  • Rob says:

    22 Feb22 February 14:17

    Yes, it is – that’s how I got the screenshots.

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