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

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• PM says:

  17 Feb17 February 07:02

  Also Gold Amex offers travel inconveniences cover.

  • Hhibs says:

    17 Feb17 February 10:05

    That is interesting,is it valid for over 70’s and must you have used an American Express card or specifically the Amex Gold ?

    • G says:

      17 Feb17 February 14:55

      Travel Inconvenience Cover is valid for all ages. This is cover for lost baggage, delayed flights etc and not intended as a substitute for travel insurance cover.

• Paul says:

  17 Feb17 February 07:08

  Not sure it’s innovative. It’s certainly not very clever. S75 is an incredibly valuable benefit especially when dealing with an organisation that till now has a reputation for simply awful pre and post flight customer service.

  • The real Swiss Tony says:

    17 Feb17 February 07:32

    This is likely why they are doing it. The merchant fee plus the risk of chargeback is getting too costly. Have read about other merchants offering 10%-20% off if you pay direct – guess that doesn’t work with wafer thin airline margins but I wonder if this is the right model, albeit with the wrong application?

  • JDB says:

    17 Feb17 February 08:00

    s75 is indeed a very valuable benefit but it actually works less well for airline tickets than many other consumer goods or services because of the nature of airline contracts and inapplicability of some consumer legislation. People seem to be increasingly resorting to s75 as some sort of cure all – recent published FOS cases are full of failed claims.

    • NFH says:

      17 Feb17 February 08:10

      True. Between the time of embarkation and disembarkation, the Montreal Convention is the overriding authority, causing domestic legislation not to apply. But Section 75 does include breaches of contract covered under the Montreal Convention and those occurring outside its temporal scope as well as misrepresentations, which typically occur at the time of booking.

      • JDB says:

        17 Feb17 February 08:55

        As a practical matter that really won’t help you in making a claim to Amex, let alone other UK card providers who will resist. s75 isn’t generally a good route for this sort of complex claim unless you know what you are doing and you are likely to need to take it to MCOL if the matter really can’t be resolved with the airline. There is a final wrinkle in all this as some have discovered – you can win the claim with the airline or car hire company only to find they still pursue the debt.

• Adam says:

  17 Feb17 February 07:20

  Apart from S75 protection, couldn’t you just plan the payment and withdraw using curve over the course of a few days with say your Barclay Card and then you’d get both amounts of Avios per pound!!

  • NFH says:

    17 Feb17 February 08:33

    What do you mean by “withdraw”? It would need to be a purchase transaction to be covered by Curve’s chargeback.

    • meta says:

      17 Feb17 February 13:53

      Using Curve invalidates S75 as it’s considered an intermediary.

      • Chris H says:

        17 Feb17 February 20:16

        They have just introduced their own S75 protection!

• NFH says:

  17 Feb17 February 07:26

  Of course airlines prefer payment by bank transfer in order to avoid chargebacks from card issuers when the airline is in breach of contract. This should not be encouraged, particularly when paying airlines in jurisdictions with poor consumer protection legislation.

  In the case of Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, subsection 2 entitles the card issuer “Subject to any agreement between them, the creditor shall be entitled to be indemnified by the supplier for loss suffered by the creditor in satisfying his liability under subsection (1), including costs reasonably incurred by him in defending proceedings instituted by the debtor“. So it’s not just the amount of the original transaction at stake, but all the other losses such as legal costs and consequential losses incurred by the card holder. Airlines will do anything to avoid this.

• Ken says:

  17 Feb17 February 08:01

  It’s like the pandemic never happened and no one in history had problems getting cash back from airlines.

  Borderline idiotic.

  • meta says:

    17 Feb17 February 13:55

    And the next one might be round the corner, and other natural and man-made disasters and catastrophes, let alone war. We live in uncertain times.

• J says:

  17 Feb17 February 08:13

  Could possibly be argued this is a consumer rights breach:

  ‘13.1 Discounts for a particular means of payment
  13.2 Whilst encouraging customers to pay with a certain payment method is not prohibited,
  it is important that any discounts for use of a particular means of payment do not
  create a situation in which those making payments by other means are effectively
  faced with a surcharge that does not comply with the Regulations.’

  • NFH says:

    17 Feb17 February 08:22

    That’s an interesting point. You’re quoting the government’s guidlines for the Consumer Rights (Payment Surcharges) Regulations 2012, of which Regulation 6A outlaws surcharges for payment by card, which derives from an EU directive.

  • JDB says:

    17 Feb17 February 08:59

    There’s no discount being offered! The price of the service being sold is identical. On the same analysis you could argue there’s a breach of consumer right someone shopping at Tesco receives Clubcard points when someone else doesn’t. It’s a non runner, just looking for trouble.

    • J says:

      17 Feb17 February 09:17

      If Tesco offered clubcard points for paying with cash instead of credit card, the CMA would almost certainly step in.

      • JDB says:

        17 Feb17 February 10:05

        The CMA is about to get a whole lot less consumer friendly, as is the FOS after the government sacked the bosses for not being growth friendly enough sending a message across the sector Admiral Byng style. Other regulators will be getting a bit nervous.

• John says:

  17 Feb17 February 08:57

  So out of interest how does it actually work, is it a UK-only thing? Will it let you pay for a flight from a non-UK origin?

  How does it know you have a UK account, what if you’re an EU resident but booking a flight from the UK.

  I’ve used Chase debit card to pay for easyJet/Wizz flights as the 1% return is ok and I don’t care that much about protection on a £25 purchase

  • John says:

    17 Feb17 February 08:57

    (and S75 isn’t applicable for items under £100 anyway)

    • Andrew says:

      17 Feb17 February 15:06

      You’re right that S75 isn’t applicable under £100 but, ignoring that for now, you’d get a lot more protection that just your £25. If your cheap flight was cancelled a couple of days before departure any replacement would almost certainly cost a lot more than £25. S75 would cover that full cost and not just a refund for what you’ve paid.

  • Rob says:

    17 Feb17 February 09:42

    Works for most countries, not just UK. It links into the IATA payment system.

• Roy says:

  17 Feb17 February 09:11

  So Is it UK bank transfer (as the title says) or is it Pay By Bank (as the article says)?

  The latter seems to be a service from MasterCard (presumably using Open Banking) that – according to the only info I could find – is currently only available to Barclays and HSBC accounts, with other banks to follow “soon”

  https://www.mastercard.co.uk/en-gb/personal/ways-to-pay/pay-by-bank-app.html

  • Graeme says:

    17 Feb17 February 09:44

    It is IATA Pay, as the Qatar screenshot in the article implies.

    https://www.iata.org/en/services/finance/iata-pay/

    • Roy says:

      17 Feb17 February 10:53

      That link talks about directly debiting the customer back account so I presume IATA Pay uses Open Banking?

      I have to admit that to date I’ve steered clear of Open Banking because I just don’t understand it well enough to come to a conclusion as to whether it’s safe or not. (I realise I probably sound like those who refused to countenance direct debits when they first arrived).

      • John says:

        17 Feb17 February 11:34

        It’s safe if implemented well, but hard to assess if an institution has implemented it well.

        I can’t see any benefit of it to me personally, as I don’t want to see all my accounts in one app.

        I’ve linked some unused accounts to get minor benefits e.g. Airtime rewards.

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