BA business London to Greece / Spain / Croatia / Turkey for £106 o/w!
Not sure if it’s a sale or error fare, but British Airways has released some great Club Europe fares from London Gatwick to the Spanish / Greek islands and other destinations. The snag is it’s for one-way only.
To start with, check out BA’s low price finder here, which gives you an idea which destinations are included.
- Dubrovnik £109
- Dalaman £123
- Menorca £100
- Ibiza £118
- Corfu £106
- Kos £118
- Rhodes £113
- Santorini £118
- Sardina £114
- Thessaloniki £111
Destinations include Greece, Spain, Turkey and Croatia, and the available dates are in the last week of October and sometimes the first week of November. The common ground is, these routes are all gonna pause in November which kind of explains the exceptional fare.
Here are a couple of examples via Skyscanner:
Dalaman and the Greek destinations will earn you 80 Tier points, and it’s 40 otherwise.
If you price up a return ticket it’s gonna be much more expensive, so make sure you have an alternative way coming back!
New wave of Marriott devaluation landed
Marriott transitioned into dynamic redemption pricing a couple of years ago, and although it was all good news at the very beginning, devaluation has progressively spread at many regions / properties since. It seems that a new major wave kicked in last Saturday (August 5th).
My friend Zaozao who developed a pricing monitoring tool, noticed the phenomenon and here are sone examples of the price increase:
From left to right these three hotels are: W Osaka, Westin Singapore and St Regis Bangkok.
The devaluation seems to be still unfolding and stabilising over the last few days. Here is how Westin London City’s prices changed over night:
Hilton has completed sabotaged their program after the introduction of dynamic pricing, and it looks like Marriott thinks it’s a good idea to follow the same path. Thankfully, IHG appears to be in their right mind and they still offer many great redemption options.
Hilton’s confusing new paid upgrade feature at online check-in
I’m going to Cancun for a few days and chose the Canopy by Hilton hotel as my first stop. I booked it via Amex’s The Hotel Collection, and the reservation appeared on my Hilton app immediately. There is the Request Upgrade page which you are probably familiar with:
Basically these are standby options that offer room upgrade, meals or credit at a discounted price. When you arrive at the hotel they will inform you whether the standby has cleared, and you don’t pay anything until then.
There are very good deals occasionally but I very rarely pay for an upgrade. One thing I really like about Hilton’s app though, is that you can view floor plan of the hotel and even pick your room accordingly at online check-in. However this time I noticed something rather unusual:
It is advertising paid upgrade to some enhanced rooms, including a suite.
Quite confusingly, they are paid but the price is confidential. How can people pay for something when they don’t even know the price?
I sent an inquiry using the app’s Chat feature. A friendly member of staff came back to me saying that they’d upgraded me to the premium room, however for the suite I’d need to pay more than 500 dollars. It is awkward as the confidential price ended up being higher than what eStandby offered!
There was some news October last year about a new upgrade feature offered to elite members and I guess it’s related, although I’m not sure how prevalent Hilton hotels are selling it right now. Personally I think it adds little value as eStandby is already well integrated, especially as the price is not disclosed.
My review of Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower
After one-night in central Barcelona at the Le Meridien hotel, I booked the Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower hotel with my own Hyatt Leverage plan. I received a nice free-night promotion from Hyatt, plus was (for a very short period) upgraded to Globalist due to a loophole…
The hotel is fairly far out by the Hospital de Bellvitge station, last stop of the red metro line. It’s about 30 minutes by metro to the city centre, or 20 minutes to the airport by bus.
The hotel building is quite prominent once you have exited the station, on top of which there’s a huge Hesperia sign that is the owner of the hotel.
The lobby is large and impressive.
Once having confirmed my name and ID, the receptionist lady greeted me with a very warm welcome, and invited the duty manager to have a chat with me. She then gave me a thorough introduction of the hotel facilities, breakfast and the club lounge, while accompanying me to the lift.
My (suite) upgrade experience with Marriott, IHG and Hilton has been pretty poor in Europe. This is the first and maybe only time I’m staying as a Globalist, and they upgraded me to a Regency Suite on the 24th floor. The highest guest floor is the 25th, and there’s a famous(?) rooftop restaurant on the 29th.
As there’s no separate living room, it’s probably more of a junior suite. However the TV-mounting wall segregates the space well, and you definitely won’t find it confined here.
The room has a traditional layout, is well furnished, and there’s no apparent sign of wear and tear. It is surely a very high standard as of hotels in Europe.
The bathroom comes with a small wardrobe as well as a jet tub.
It is the tallest building in the neighbourhood by a good margin so you have a nice view.
You can cast content to the TV via Chromecast or the Hyatt mobile app.
As recommended by the hotel staff, I had my breakfast in the main restaurant.
Here’s the buffet:
Classic Spanish breakfast with a large selection of cured meat. The quality is decent, although I’m a bit disappointed that they don’t offer churros here.
The Hyatt Regency Club is located on the fifth floor, and it is Huge!
As a business hotel they’ve done a good job catering to business clients’ needs. There are four conference rooms in the club lounge.
Fruits, snacks and drinks (including beer and wine) are displayed throughout the day.
Happy Hour is 5pm to 7pm every evening. In addition to salad and cheese etc, there are two hot items offered each day. I had a lot of fried meat balls and beef stew…
Liquor and spirited are also on offer.
Breakfast in the club lounge is a lot simpler, although they make some special dishes here such as the Bao.
Gym is very small and I’m not impressed. The swimming pool is contracted so all guests including Globalists must pay a €10 fee per day, which I didn’t use.
When I was checking out, the receptionist again called for the (general?) manage who was on his way out to have a personal chat with me. He was very attentive and asked if I wanted to bring a couple of bottles of water with me.
I’m truly impressed how well Globalists are treated at Hyatt Hotels. Although they don’t have 4pm guaranteed late check-out which I find very useful, it is better than my Marriott Titanium experience is almost every way. Sadly I was (duly) downgraded back to Explorist shortly after my stay.
Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower is a very solid hotel with great guest rooms and club lounge. The location is inconvenient though, so I only recommend you to stay here on your first or last day utilising its proximity to the airport.
Hilton targeted offers – up to 4,000 bonus points
Hilton initiated a new wave of targeted offers, and there are two versions that are being circulated.
I received an email of the first offer the other day. I couldn’t register at that time though due to “technical difficulties”, but it seems to have been fixed. I couldn’t register to the other offer.
Additional 50% off on Amazon Warehouse products!
Amazon Warehouse is a platform of great deals if you don’t mind second-hand items. They’ve run occasional 20% – 30% off sales from time to time, and it seems that they’ve launched another even better one secretly.
The offer is well hidden and requires some digging.
- Visit Amazon Warehouse‘s page
- Pick a department of interest from the list on the left, e.g. Home & Kitchen
- Apply the filter Deals & Discounts / All Discounts
It will then only show you products on which the additional discount applies. You’ll see the reduced price when you check out:
Enjoy shopping!
Avios Balance Booster offer ending and a useful trick
British Airways launched a new feature called Balance Booster in June that introduced a new way of purchasing Avios at a lower cost. There is an ongoing 10% bonus that will end on Monday, so don’t miss out if you need to top up your account.
The annoying part is that you can only purchase maximum triple the amount that you’ve earned in the last 30 days, which may not be enough. Interestingly, a reader has shared a trick / loophole that allows you to work around that cap and buy more.
When you land on the Balance Booster page, the frontend will only load past transactions that haven’t been boosted. When you complete a purchase, the backend will update the record to mark that transaction as “boosted”.
However, there’s a delay before the frontend is notified of that change. It means that you have a short time window to boost the transaction again (and more) if you are quick enough.
I tried it once and it worked out. The delay was approximately five minutes.
Beware that it is a loophole so there’s some risk associated, although I think it’s fairly low. At the end of day you are paying money to BA, and there’s the 250,000 Avios cap which prevents unlimited boosting, so it should be fine.
The blog is up again (I hope)
We’ve suffered major hosting problem with GoDaddy since Tuesday, and unfortunately after numerous phone calls the outage is still ongoing. They even tried to blame me for some “irregular traffic” at some point, and although we reached an agreement that they were at fault in the end, I was given no ETA for the resolution.
It’s funny how their customer service was trying to sell me upgrades at the meantime. Their idea of persuading me into purchasing additional products while they were showing incompetency was beyond me. Their technical arguments were also laughable given my software engineering background!
As soon as I regained access to cpanel and my backup on Sunday I migrated my blog to Hostinger. The website appears to be back up at least for now, and hopefully Hostinger can prove to be better at their job!