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Bits: site speed, Royal Jordanian offering status buy back, Champions League hospitality deals

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News in brief:

Our site speed issues should be fixed

Apologies to anyone who has been struggling with HfP running slowly in recent days. We have tracked down the problem to a rogue AI system in the US which was continually bombarding us with data requests. The situation should now be back to normal.

Royal Jordanian will let you buy back elite status

Many HfP readers matched their airline or hotel status to Royal Jordanian over the last year or so.

Why? Because Royal Jordanian is a oneworld alliance member, alongside British Airways, and so your Royal Jordanian status is valid on British Airways.

The current status match offer is here. You can only match hotel elite status to BA Bronze equivalent (Silver Jay status) whilst airline status can be matched up to BA Silver equivalent (Gold Sparrow).

If you did this match a year ago and did not requalify, Royal Jordanian is letting people buy back their status. You will have received a personalised email:

  • you can buy back Silver Jay status (= BA Bronze) for $75 for 12 months
  • you can buy back Gold Sparrow status (=BA Silver) for $350 for 12 months

I consider these deals to be great value and well worth considering. Your Silver Jay status will give you free seat selection on BA flights from seven days before departure – well worth $75.

Pay $350 to extend Gold Sparrow and you have British Airways lounge access, priority check-in, free seat selection at the time of booking etc locked in for another year.

What’s interesting is that Royal Jordanian clearly thinks it can make money selling Gold Sparrow for $350, even though I assume it is being billed whenever you access a oneworld lounge with your status.

Royal Jordanian seems to offer buy backs on a regular basis, so if you do a match to Gold Sparrow status now (see our article) there is a decent chance you will be able to extend it for a second year later on.

Extend Royal Jordanian Gold Sparrow status

Good value Champions League hospitality tickets

This has nothing to do with miles and points, but Travelzoo has – alongside its hotel deals – a niche section offering VIP football packages. See here.

A surprisingly good value selection of UEFA Champions League and Carabao Cup games were added yesterday.

The packages below include food and drink or lounge access of some sort – details vary by ground and ticket type. The list was correct as of 8pm last night but games do sell out quickly.

  • Arsenal vs Olympiakos for £234 (1st October)
  • Arsenal vs Bayern Munich for £534 (26th November)
  • Arsenal vs Kairat for £200 (28th January) 
  • Chelsea vs Benfica for £157 (30th September)
  • Manchester City vs Bayer Leverkusen for £112 (25th November)
  • Manchester City vs Borussia Dortmund for £120 (5th November)
  • Manchester City vs Galatasaray for £120 (28th January)
  • Tottenham Hotspur vs Copenhagen for £167 (4th November)
  • Tottenham Hotspur vs Slavia Praha for £127 (9th December)
  • Tottenham Hotspur vs Borussia Dortmund for £234 (20th January)

You can find out more on this page of the Travelzoo site.

Category

oneworld alliance partners

Comments (69)

  • Ian Collier says:
    10 Sep10 September 08:16

    I’m just going to note they are picky about booking classes.
    I flew premium economy from Heathrow to Hong Kong via Helsinki and business for the return with Finnair recently and they refused to credit any miles.

    Reply
    • John says:
      10 Sep10 September 10:23

      Yes, always wise to check this before every flight, especially now that it’s very difficult to change your FFP

      Reply
  • yonasl says:
    10 Sep10 September 08:21

    So you can spend GBP 7,500 + taxes with BA or USD 350 to be OW sapphire. I have a feeling I know what most people may go for!

    Reply
  • Occasional Ranter says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:03

    Sorry if it’s covered elsewhere, but is there an online method for substituting the RJ membership number on bookings made with Avios on ba ? I understood that the royal Maroc route got shut down?

    My only use for gold sparrow status was seat selection on club Europe/club world redemptions. If it’s a lot of hassle to get that in practice then I won’t bother renewing.

    Reply
    • Numpty says:
      10 Sep10 September 09:30

      I cant get any of the MMB sites on avios airlines to work any longer, Maroc was the last one. I think i read on Flyertalk they’ve all been stopped, and unless you add the FF number at time of booking you cant do it. Some have success by phoning up, but depends on airline. Others may have a better understanding.

      Reply
    • DM says:
      10 Sep10 September 09:35

      The easiest is via BA chat.

      Reply
      • RH says:
        10 Sep10 September 09:52

        So for the existing bookings there is no way you change the booking reference yourself via another carrier site anymore? You have to contact BA to do this now via chat or phone? Thanks.

        Reply
    • Jake says:
      10 Sep10 September 09:59

      I did it via Fiji Air. Fiji allowed me to update the FF number and whilst it failed it did remove the existing BA number. I was then able to log into BA and add the RJ (or other one world number) directly into the booking

      Reply
  • Neil says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:23

    Hi a quick question, if I renew my silver jay status and fly a few days after expiry next year, I’m aware I can reserve seats 7 days in advance. However I fly 3 days after expiry as my seats will be booked will they be honoured
    Hope xx this b makes sense.

    Reply
    • memesweeper says:
      10 Sep10 September 09:37

      yes, that’s normally the case. If your seats are changed by the airline at short notice (eg equipment swap) you’re out of luck.

      Reply
    • Ramsey says:
      10 Sep10 September 09:40

      Seat booking options are based on the status you hold at the time you want to change/book the seats, not when you fly… so if you’ve booked them when a higher status, you’ll still have those seat reservations when you check in.

      Reply
      • Neil says:
        10 Sep10 September 09:42

        Thanks guys for the fast responses

        Reply
      • JDB says:
        10 Sep10 September 10:00

        Unfortunately that’s not correct. As @memesweeper says, if something like an aircraft change occurs or any human review of seating takes place which is usual in the days before a long haul flight any seating allocation that, at that moment, doesn’t have the relevant status or isn’t paid will be removed. You also won’t receive any notification. The fact one had status at the time of booking works until it doesn’t; to be sure you need to hold the status from booking until the flight date.

        Reply
      • Points Hound says:
        10 Sep10 September 10:11

        “Seat booking options are based on the status you hold at the time you want to change/book the seats, not when you fly”

        100% incorrect

        Reply
        • John says:
          10 Sep10 September 10:25

          50% incorrect

          Reply
        • Rob says:
          10 Sep10 September 10:34

          Not that simple. Historically if your BA status dropped and you didn’t ‘disturb’ the booking by going into MMB, the seats usually stayed. Not sure if the new IT system has changed this.

          Reply
          • yonasl says:
            10 Sep10 September 15:49

            I can confirm a seating selected while silver is still there now that my OH has dropped to bronze (she is flying on her own). There was even a cancellation of one of the legs and rebooking (on AA because of free seating) and her old seat with BA on the leg that was not changed remains. She can still select the seat 7 days before the flight if she gets kicked out which I don’t expect will happen.

  • Duck Ling says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:39

    Not sure if it is just me but does anyone else have constant issues crediting their BA flights to their RJ account?

    I would say at least 50% of the time in my experience I have to do a ‘claim’ on rj.com and then follow up with a further email with screenshots of boarding passes etc.

    Reply
    • Points Hound says:
      10 Sep10 September 10:19

      I had this issue when I started crediting to RJ but I was doing the BA / RJ number hokey pokey for lounge access purposes. Since moving up to RJ Gold I’ve stopped this now and just use my RJ number from booking. Since that point everything has credited and much quicker too.

      Going through the first wing last week I did my normal and showed my gold card in the app. I was surprised as the lady said she needed to enter my BA number into a ‘new system’ to give me first wing or lounge access. I thought she was being fly and was changing it in Amadeus as they have said it was required perviously, but she spun her screen round and showed me as she enter the details. Said it was to allow gold card holder entry if they were travelling on a different OW scheme. She entered my BA number and if pinged up my name confirming I was gold.

      She then brought up Amadeus that clearly showed my RJ number. She then printed a manual BC for me to prove the RJ number was present. She couldn’t have been more helpful.

      That flight credited to RJ 5 days later.

      Reply
  • BSI1978 says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:43

    Keenly priced but as others have commented, a notable bump up on the original price. Personally I’m Silver until April ’26 so not ready to stump up that cash for c.5-months.

    No guarantees of course, but suspect a raft of people will similarly be seeing status end around that time so expecting (hoping!) for some more status matches around then. Not the end of the world if it doesn’t happen of course.

    Reply
    • Rob says:
      10 Sep10 September 10:39

      It will be open season in Feb-April next year. I am 99% sure Flying Blue and Miles & More will be matching BA, as will easyJet with its new programme.

      Reply
  • Richie says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:45

    It’s worth considering that RJ is not a big airline. It only has seven wide body aircraft and these are the smallest Dreamliner. It could at some point require eligible flights to/from/via Amman to maintain status in its frequent flyer programmes.

    Reply
  • Reeferman says:
    10 Sep10 September 09:58

    Thanks for fixing the site speed issue @Rob
    Working normally for me again now

    Reply
    • Rob says:
      10 Sep10 September 10:37

      We’ve done a bit more pruning of AI tools too.

      The real question is whether we block Chat GPT. To put it in context, in the last 7 days it has made 250,000 requests from HfP. Our total huge page views to humans in the same period was around 600,000.

      Google and Bing are a similar scale BUT you can tell Google Search when your site is quiet (midnight to 6am in our case, UK time) and it will crawl then. You can’t control Chat GPT crawling.

      Shockingly, we are also paying around £200 per month in overage fees to our hosting provider to fund the bandwidth taken up by Chat GPT.

      In return, we get about 40 clicks per day, vs 12,000 from Google Search.

      Reply
      • Richie says:
        10 Sep10 September 11:08

        That’s very interesting. If some websites block AI because of possibly unaffordable overage fees, that seems the scope of AI results will be reduced, but some may still perceive their AI search results to have reached some plateau of perfection.

        Reply
        • Rob says:
          10 Sep10 September 11:12

          AI results technically have reached a plateau. There are 18,000 articles on HfP, what do the three new ones each day add to that?

          Reply
      • points_worrier says:
        10 Sep10 September 15:14

        Thats really interesting. Thanks for this info. I don’t think I’d quite appeciated this business-side consequences of AI

        Reply
      • Colin MacKinnon says:
        10 Sep10 September 16:17

        Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust has a stake in Cloudflare which I know HfP uses.

        SM says CF is developing tools to charge AI scrapers.

        Reply
        • Rob says:
          10 Sep10 September 17:37

          It is, but that’s unlikely to make any difference to us given the relatively low volume of content we produce, even assuming people did pay. We need to have an internal think about whether we block it or not.

          Reply

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