Airmiles vs Nectar Article

Airmiles is relaunching; so should you shop and hop aboard? Richard Green sizes up the competition

More than 6m people have unspent Airmiles at the back of a sock drawer, or gathering cyberdust at the foot of an e-mail inbox. In total, there are more unused Airmiles and frequent-flyer points in circulation than there are US dollars. But the Airmiles company thinks all that will change — that soon, we will be rushing to use our stockpile of loyalty. It has relaunched its website, redesigned its corporate image — and, it claims, greatly improved the value of “miles” and the availability of “free” flights.

Haven’t we heard this before, though, when Airmiles (then called AirMiles) started back in 1988? It built brand loyalty by giving us free miles when we shopped or flew with partner companies, which could be exchanged for free flights later. It sounded too good to be true then, and it soon seemed it probably was. The problems started when it came to swapping collected miles for free flights. There never seemed to be enough of either. You always needed more miles to fly on the day you wanted; and no matter how flexible you were, there weren’t any seats.

So, we lost interest and went back to buying flights as we had always done. Then came the arrival of the no-frills carriers. Traditional airlines slashed their fares to compete, and there was even less incentive to collect air miles. In addition, taxes and fees, which are always payable, even when claiming a flight through a loyalty scheme, are now a much larger part of the ticket price.

Airmiles thinks it can woo us back with cheaper flights and easier ways to collect and spend our miles. Here we test its new schemes and those of the two other main players — Buy and Fly! and Nectar — by trying to book a break in Budapest (Thursday to Sunday, from London) and a week in Hong Kong (Saturday to Saturday, from London), from July.


AIRMILES

Airmiles has the widest range of collecting and spending opportunities, and boldly claims that its collecting partners account for 75% of the average household’s weekly spend.

The newly designed website looks snazzy, and you can log on with your membership details to check your miles balance, as well as to check flight and hotel availability and make bookings.

The relaunch blurb talks about “guaranteeing” the number of miles needed for the top 20 destinations; in other words, there will be plenty of flights exchangeable for a predetermined number of air miles. But after several hours of searching on the website, I was encountering the same old problems.

The first available weekend in Budapest was from September 21. For a week in Hong Kong — apart from one week in July from the 15th — the first availability was from September 2.

The new site doesn’t have the option to part pay in miles and part in cash, as the old one did, so most searches leave you facing a screen saying, “There are no full miles prices available on the dates you requested.

If you can only travel on those dates, please view our cash prices here” — ie, forget your Airmiles and pay. It refers you to a “fare-finder calendar”, but this table only displays British Airways flights, which is no use if other airlines have seats and BA doesn’t.

The recorded message at the call centre greets you by saying that waits are in excess of 10 minutes, and suggests that using the website might be better. I hung on, and asked about Budapest on the weekends that the website showed as unavailable. I was told that I couldn’t use my miles, and would have to pay a cash fare. It was initially the same for Hong Kong, but the operator had a change of heart and let me buy a flight for a mix of 5,700 miles, £308 and £116 extra for taxes.

One plus: there is no expiry date, which helps if you are saving for a long-haul flight.

Who’s involved: NatWest credit cards, Tesco, Shell and more than 80 online retailers. You also accrue miles when booking travel through Airmiles itself. Not available in the Republic of Ireland.

0870 557 7722, www.airmiles.co.uk

NECTAR

This outfit started in 2002, headed by Sir Keith Mills, who devised Airmiles. The website lets you monitor your account balance online and make flight bookings. Whereas the other schemes have different collecting rates with different partners, you get two Nectar points for every £1 that you spend.

There was availability to Budapest throughout July, August and September, with the lowest points needed being 7,600 and the highest 16,000. The same applied for Hong Kong throughout the summer, with the lowest nonstop flights starting at 76,000 points with Qantas in July, rising to 130,000 points for Virgin Atlantic on the most popular weeks.

Note that there is often an additional £5 service fee per free flight booking, over and above the usual taxes and fees charged by the airlines.

Who’s involved: Amex Nectar Card, Sainsbury’s, BP and dozens of online retailers, including HMV.co.uk, Amazon and Dixons.co.uk. 0870 410 0100, www.nectar.com