Six best ways to use your Avios
Avios is the award currency of British Airways, Iberia Airlines and Aer Lingus. It is probably the most well-known the most popular airline loyalty programme in the world.
The Boomerang Trick for Your Flying Blue Miles
Flying Blue, the loyalty scheme of Air France and KLM, is a popular programme for those who fly Skyteam regularly. Since the introduction of dynamic priced redemption, it is more difficult to get good value for Flying Blue miles nowadays. Today we are going to talk about a trick that can potentially maximise its value, if used correctly.
(more…)Melia selling points at lowest price ever, but with a caveat
We talked about the Melia Rewards programme previously, and their points can represent excellent value when redeemed for hotel stays. Melia is running a very attractive point sale at the moment, which is worth a look if you are interested.
The promotion has two parts. Firstly, if you log in to Melia’s “Buy Points” page, you can see the price has been reduced to €5 per 1000 points. This is not a bad deal itself as it represent 37.5% discount from the regular price (€8).
In addition to this, you get 50% bonus for your first purchase during the promotional period, until 12th July.
Factoring in this bonus, basically you are paying 3.33 euro for every 1000 points. This is a very attractive deal. In fact, the best deal ever was when Amazon ES had a Black Friday sale, where you could purchase 55,000 points for €165. This is getting very close to that level.
For a five-star Melia hotel (for example, Melia Madrid Princesa at which I’ve stayed twice), or a 4-star in London or New York, one room night costs fewer than 25,000 points. That translates to only 83 euro!
For Gran Meliá Palacio de Isora, a luxury resort that is generally regarded as the best hotel in the Melia portfolio, a half-board package costs 43,609 points per night. That is only 146 euro. As a comparison, the cash rate is €289 which is already lowered given the current situation, so you are almost getting a 50% discount here.
Sounds too good to be true right? Well it is, because the 50% bonus comes with a catch. Instead of being deposited into your account like other “normal” points, the bonus points will show up under “My Promotions” (presumably in the form of a voucher) and there are many restrictions to using it.
They must be used by the end of this year, after which the bonus points will expire, and you won’t get any points back if you cancel reservations booked using them.
They can only be used towards stays by 30th April, 2021.
All bonus points must be used IN A SINGLE TRANSACTION. Say that you are awarded 50,000 bonus points in this promotion, but only need 10,000 for your booking, you are not going to get the remaining 40,000 points back.
Also, because these points are awarded in a promotional form, they can’t be transferred to others, or converted into airline miles.
Is this a good promotion? Certainly. As I mentioned earlier, €5 for 1000 points is already a decent deal. But I would advise you to proceed carefully if you care about the 50% bonus, and make sure it doesn’t go to waste.
Customise and Improve Awin’s Convert-a-link Script
If you are a user of Awin, you probably have heard of or been using their Convert-a-link feature. This is a handy feature – it converts all links to Awin affiliated advertisers on your site to Awin links automatically, so you don’t have to manually convert them one by one.
(more…)Hotel Loyalty Programme Series – Hilton Honors
You don’t need me to tell you what Hilton is – it is probably one of the best known hotels (or hotel groups) in the world. Being a US-based hotel group, it has massive footprint in the North America continent, as well as many other locations. Hilton has got a decent number of properties in the UK and some other European countries.
