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LondonTravels wrote:

Good morning from the early BA flight to Istanbul. Five days at the St Regis lie ahead, booked with Marriott 4-4-5 points. Flight is a redemption too.

My “new” lover is now officially in our club, having just taken delivery of her first Amex (and indeed first credit card of any kind).

Thanks again for the prior kind words and support, things remain firmly on track.

Lovely to hear things are working out for you. Enjoy the trip

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Double result there NL 👌

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NorthernLass wrote:

Thanks, I’m not with O2 either! I want the Sunday ideally. I’ve registered with the GA website but not had any response and Ticketmaster is asking for a code to purchase, which presumably I will need to be sent?[/quote

That link seems to take you straight to purchase and they have Sunday. Have a try

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@northernlass
Be logged into ticketmaster, make sure you have a payment card registered.
Keep refreshing from about 15 mins before sale time.
On high demand events they now seem to put you into a waiting room from about 15 mins early.
If you have the phone app try that as well – sometimes easier to get through on there than on Web.
Once you’re in a queue it pays to wait rather than refresh.
Try a couple of windows, but if you get to tickets on one then close the rest – they have a habit of chucking you out when they detect multiple purchase attempts

Good luck

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NorthernLass wrote:

strickers wrote:

Interesting detail about the current Booking.com scam on the Sky News website. Might be worth adding to a ‘bits’ article @Rob?

https://news.sky.com/story/bookingcom-customers-warned-of-well-designed-scam-putting-details-for-sale-on-dark-web-13018816

Someone posted earlier this week that they’d had one of these emails.

Yes, I had one as well couple of weeks ago. In addition to the email, the message also appeared in the BDC app. One piece of advice BDC say is that any emails will come from a genuine BDC address I.e. ending @booking.com. That’s pretty useless advice as email supposedly came from noreply@……. so did have the right domain! Seems they are spoofing address as well!
Anyway the wording made me suspicious and I’m aware of the scam so was able to contact hotel directly by phone and they confirmed not genuine.
The other day I had an email from BDC saying to stay alert about these in relation to the hotel I had booked, and asking me to click links to say if I had had one or not. Given the nature of the scam I was suspicious of that one too at first but the links were genuine BDC.

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BJ wrote:

Wintry weather coming in! Stand by for the usual travel chaos resulting from the inability of UK airports, rails and roads to cope with uncertainty and even minor deviations from the norm. Having said that, driving down the A1 from Edinburgh to Eyemouth and Berwick last Saturday we were surprised to see gritters already out in force so full marks to East Lothian and/or Borders for that as it did go below zero last few nights..

Gritters been out in parts of Scotland for few weeks now – nothing remarkable about that!!

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1. I used Free Sofia Tour (put those words together with a dot com and you have their web site). They do one around the city, a Jewish themed one and a Plovdiv one as well if you can get to there yourself)
2. I did a full day to Plovdiv with coach – but from memory we didn’t return back to Sofia till around 5 or 6pm, so that might be a bit tight for you. Others have been independently so am sure they can comment. It’s around 2 hours travel by road each way.
3. I seem to remember tipping by cash.

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freckles wrote:

Seems to be a change to T&C’s noted today (for UK) on the FT thread stating to qualify you must now be a UK resident

. A “Qualifying Booking” is a British Airways Holidays booking that meets all of the following criteria:
…b) The booking must be made by a UK resident

Further update to T&C’s
b) The booking must be made by a UK resident and must originate and end in the UK

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I’m with you @froggee To many people, Fray Bentos was a luxury while growing up. I half hope that story is true, and half hope it’s been embellished over time

To the OP, OK it’s not to your taste, but as JDB says there are ways and means to make a point without seeming to insult or demean people. Absolutely what is wrong with a bit of corned beef on occasion; you know for certain what is happening in the kitchen at the CCR?; do you really think people who are unfortunate to be in the position of having to use food banks can afford to fly F or have status to use CCR?

Almost thinking I have strayed onto another DYKWIA thread.

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NorthernLass wrote:

I got a quote from Questor and was rather annoyed, as after selecting “Worldwide excluding USA”, my quote then stipulated “Worldwide, except USA, Canada and Caribbean”, which is somewhat different (and I need the cover in the Caribbean)!

As with travel insurance, I would always expect ‘worldwide ex USA’ to mean USA/Canada and the Caribbean

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Anyone with reservations via Booking dot com with Radissson beware – had a phishing message saying new booking policies and need to undergo a credit card verification process.
Alarm bells were ringing as
– need to do within 24 hours or booking cancelled
– need to do it even if fully pre paid

Spoken to hotel direct, and even before I had finished speaking they were confirming it’s not from them or booking dot com.

It’s fairly convincing, the email address it’s supposedly from is verified by my email provider and the message appears in my booking dot com account. Anyone not familiar with these scams could be easily fooled.

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phantomchickenz wrote:

Despite saying to use the code “CASES” at checkout, when checking out it says the code is not valid! Anyone had success?

The CASES code offer expired yesterday

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@JDB There is some travel inconvenience cover included

https://icm.aexp-static.com/Internet/internationalcardshop/en_gb/pdf/ba-premium-plus-credit-card/UK_BA_Premium_Plus_Insurance_Documentation_v1_0.pdf

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Seems to be a change to T&C’s noted today (for UK) on the FT thread stating to qualify you must now be a UK resident

. A “Qualifying Booking” is a British Airways Holidays booking that meets all of the following criteria:
…b) The booking must be made by a UK resident

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Andrew J wrote:

Amex seem to have pushed out a lot of soon to expire offers onto cards which were previously not targeted – must be about 10 not previously seen offers on my BAPP today. Also a new Bicester offer – cumulative £600 spend, £60 back.

Yes, I got the spend £50000 get 2500 Avios this morning – expires in 4 days!

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Julia wrote:

freckles wrote:

Julia, an annual travel policy would cover any number of trips within the year – up to a maximum each individual trip of 30,45 (or sometimes more)days; so unless you go away and only return home after 6 months it should be possible to have cover. An annual policy is so much more cost effective if you do more than 2 or 3 trips a year. Much easier that say a £50,000 bill for a medivac.
Of course any pre existing medical conditions need to be declared.

A lot of companies will cover cruises too – and some offer specialist cover such as missed ports, confinement to cabin costs if you want them. However cruise companies just require basic cover including medical, Covid etc, and most do require evidence of a policy.

Missing ports is within the rights of the cruise line without reimbursement for loss of that (hence the missed port specialist cover), but totally expect them to refund/offer replacement cruise if they cancel the whole thing.

Our cruise doesn’t require insurance. We had to buy it when Covid was around but we stopped it as soon as the threat had gone. We looked at annual policies a while back but we weren’t able to stick to the contracts. They wanted us to give an itinerary and stick to it or, pay a fee every time we wanted to make alterations. Well we’re digital nomads and popping over to Madrid for a Chinese and meet up with friends and then over to Portugal for the weekend before back to the UK is second nature for us. I will take another look though thank you.

Not sure who you were insuring with, but mine just requires me to choose geographical limit (Europe, worldwide ex USA, worldwide Inc USA), no details of planned trips or itinerary. I needed to update area this year having decided on a Caribbean cruise, but other than that only need to inform them if the medical stuff has changed from year to year.

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Julia, an annual travel policy would cover any number of trips within the year – up to a maximum each individual trip of 30,45 (or sometimes more)days; so unless you go away and only return home after 6 months it should be possible to have cover. An annual policy is so much more cost effective if you do more than 2 or 3 trips a year. Much easier that say a £50,000 bill for a medivac.
Of course any pre existing medical conditions need to be declared.

A lot of companies will cover cruises too – and some offer specialist cover such as missed ports, confinement to cabin costs if you want them. However cruise companies just require basic cover including medical, Covid etc, and most do require evidence of a policy.

Missing ports is within the rights of the cruise line without reimbursement for loss of that (hence the missed port specialist cover), but totally expect them to refund/offer replacement cruise if they cancel the whole thing.

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There was a series of articles on Virgin earlier this year (although not an obvious link to them from main headings on the site), but this one should help with questions on how the voucher actually works

https://www.headforpoints.com/2023/08/26/how-to-use-virgin-atlantic-credit-card-voucher/

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Assuming you’re just LHR-DBX, a PE ticket will earn 90 TP’s

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Yes, I’d like to see this reinstated, the lack of it (plus 1 lousy timed flight from GLA) puts me off a lot of destinations that are only served from LGW

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NorthernLass wrote:

I read it that trips which contain more than one departure from the UK won’t earn double TPs. Domestic flights don’t involve leaving the UK so presumably won’t fall foul of the rules. It’s not very well worded though, because if this is correct it means that (e.g.) LHR-EDI-LHR-AMS-LHR-EDI would earn double TPs, but LHR-AMS-LHR-BER-LHR-EDI wouldn’t, even though each trip consists of 6 sectors each earning 40 TPs normally. So in theory you could have a BA holiday which doesn’t leave the UK at all earning the double TPs, but one with a couple of hops to the continent doesn’t.
So I really don’t know how that squares with the “spirit” of the rules!

There is however this part of the T&C’s which infers the trip must leave the UK
e) The total trip length (time between first flight departing the UK and final flight returning to the UK) cannot exceed 30 days.
Also reference under part 4 about standard TP being awarded on return to UK.

Although nothing explicitly saying domestic trips including 5 days/nights hotel/car are excluded

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The first rule of Double Tier Points Club…………..

The more people post about ‘loopholes’ in the system and how to ‘take advantage’ the more these will be closed down.

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This one?
https://www.headforpoints.com/forums/topic/ba-keeping-telephone-conversations/

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https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/executive-club/collecting-avios/hotels/avios-hotels

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mgmgmgmg wrote:

Does this qualify as a Dougie points holiday:

Rtn flight + 5 nights as follows:

1 hotel night in UK (airport)
3 nights in overseas hotel
1 night in UK (airport)

Hotel must be minimum 5 nights within flight dates per T&C copied below so if your UK hotels are nights before/after flights then no, I don’t think it will

The hotel/car element of the package must be for a minimum of five nights within the flight travel dates for travel before 31 December 2024.