Malaysia Airlines London A350 business class flash sale from £1,520

I wrote about the Malaysia Airlines sale last week but over this weekend there are further reductions available. The flash sale ends on 26 March. The cheapest fares are for travel 1 Apr – 15 Jun 2018. The wider sales goes on until 4 April and is available for travel until 30 November 2018, albeit at higher prices.

From this month Malaysia will be flying twice daily A350s from London to Kuala Lumpur which represents a huge improvement in their rather dated previous A380 seats on the London route. Since you are able to earn Avios and tier points with Malaysia the offers are worth a look, especially with their brand new Golden lounge at Kuala Lumpur.

Flash sale prices start from:

• Adelaide £2,219
• Auckland £2,255
• Bali £1995 £1,545
• Bangkok £1,555
• Brisbane £2,245
• Hanoi £1,555
• Ho Chi Minh City £1,549
• Kota Kinabalu £1,535 (Borneo)
• Kuala Lumpur £2,005
• Langkawi £1,520
• Penang £1,525
• Phnom Penh £1,555
• Phuket £2099 £1,549
• Singapore £1,555
• Sydney £2,255

Buddhist temple Kek Lok Si in Penang

The prices appear to be cheapest on Malaysian Airlines website which you can find here. However, if you need a hotel as well it is always worth checking on Expedia as prices can be cheaper when you add in accommodation.  You can find the Expedia flights + hotel page here.

Quidco

Quidco are a cashback company similar to TopCashback but you can’t transfer your cashback into Avios. I still use them as well as TopCashback since they sometimes have better deals. You can join Quidco here and get £5 extra cashback when you have earned your first £5 cashback.

This weekend they have a special on Expedia that is currently better than TopCashback’s rather pathetic offerings for hotels. However, TopCashback‘s rate of 5% for flight + hotel is a good rate.

The Quidco rates of note are:

• 14% for new to Expedia hotels
• 12% on hotel bookings of 2 nights or more
• 10% on other hotel bookings
• 3.5% on flight + holiday
• 12% on transfers and ground transport

Quidco also have Heathrow official parking with 10% cashback.

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British Airways intended lease of Qatar aircraft confirmed

There have been rumours on Flyertalk that BA may lease Qatar’s short-haul A320 again as they did during the mid-fleet strike last year. It has now been confirmed that BA has formally approached the CAA for permission to operate 6 Qatar A320s from February to April 2018. They have cited that this is to cover delays with new aircraft delivery (A320neos). Although they still need formal approval it is highly likely given that this was approved last time.

So is it good news or bad news? Well, if they are to cover the A320neos they are likely to appear at Heathrow but we don’t know what routes it would be for (fingers crossed for Berlin or Luxembourg for me). The bad news is that they only have 12 business class seats so that means there are likely to be downgrades. You would, of course, be entitled to get EU compensation for this of 75% of the ticket cost which could be a bonus. The seats in economy and business are superior to BA with 2-2 in business class (see photo above) and individual entertainment in both cabins. Last year they were even serving some snack and drinks in economy for free too!

HT: airline geeks

British Airways 4.5% Cashback deal

If you are tempted by any of the flights in the current sale it is worth looking at adding a hotel to your booking even if it’s just for one night. This can often lower the flight price to below that without a hotel.  With the current TopCashback offer it is worth looking at whether to add a longer stay. TopCashback are offering 4.5% cashback with stays of 7 days or more on the combined flight and hotel price. You would still be able to use your BA Amex card to get the usual Avios plus you would get the Avios for the flight and an additional 1 Avios per £1 spent on the overall booking. Win-win! Details are here.

If you are not a member of Quidco it is free to join here (additional £5 cashback for using the link when you earn your first £5 cashback)

Qatar Airways 15% off business class + 2.1% cashback

Qatar Airways are offering up to 15% off their base fares on selected flights when using the code FLYMOREQR. In addition to this, you can get 2.1% cashback providing you click through to the Qatar website through the 15% voucher link on TopCashback. The 15% off is for flights from London Heathrow to: Bali, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Bangkok, Perth, Sydney, Kathmandu, Male (Maldives), Auckland, Phuket, Goa, Canberra, Penang, Utapao (Pattaya) and Chiang Mai.

The 15% off offers ends 15 January 2018 for travel before 31 March 2018.

If you are not a member of TopCashback it is free to join here.

Hotels.com 12 % cashback

Hotels.com have a good offer on TopCashback but beware you won’t get credit towards you reward nights as you will need to make your purchase as a guest (which could affect the hotel prices too). The offer is for 12% cashback and ends tonight 4 January. If you are not a member of TopCashback it is free to join here. It basically allows you to get a small percentage of each purchase back by clicking through to the website of your choice from TopCashback instead of going direct. You can even take the cash as Avios with a 5% bonus (occasionally 25%). I have earned around 350,000 Avios since joining TopCashback!

Quidco

Quidco have a £20 bonus on purchases (minimum spend £299) at Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com or TUI before midnight on Sunday 7 January. You may only use each opt-in bonus offer once, and the bonus will be linked to the first valid purchase made after activation. This is on top of the cashback you will receive.

It is worth still comparing with Topcashback as their rates for these companies is currently better so depending on your purchase size you may be better using that. You can join Quidco here and get £5 extra cashback when you have earned your first £5 cashback.

Opodo – £100 off flight + hotel bookings, £50 off flights

Opodo are an online travel agent that doesn’t tend to get as much exposure as Expedia or Ebookers. They are currently offering £100 off flight+hotel bookings of £1100 or more. It may be worth considering doing your next business class booking through them if the price is the same as elsewhere. EDIT: You will need to select the flights as ‘flight only’ first for business or first class and then add you hotel during the booking process.

There is also £35 off flight bookings over £500. You will need to enter the code SALE1 and book by 11 January to get the discount. You can find the Opodo booking page here.

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Regular Turning Left for Less readers will know that I am generally a big fan of TopCashback. I usually make all my travel bookings through three websites, TopCashback, Avios eStore and BA for flights due to the bonus Avios on my BA Amex. I have saved around £3000 by using TopCashback, which during bonus periods would equate to a massive 375,000 Avios. Enough for several First class flights!

How does TopCashback work?

TopCashback is very simple to use. Once you have joined, you simply go to the TopCashback site before you buy anything on the internet. If the website you are planning on buying through is listed, just click through from TopCashback and buy as usual. You will then get an email within a few hours showing that you have earned new cashback. It can take a while before the money can be withdrawn from your account. This is particularly true for hotel bookings, as you generally don’t get the cashback until after your stay. Once you can withdraw, you can either get cash via your bank account, gift vouchers or change them into Avios. At present there is a 5% bonus on Avios but often there is a 25% bonus offer.

One thing you have to be wary of is using voucher codes with TopCashback. You can only use the voucher codes listed on TopCashback otherwise, you may not be able to earn cashback. This includes gift vouchers as well.

Did you know you can even earn TopCashback without buying anything? Some sites will give you money for things such as getting an insurance quote or filling in a survey.

TopCashback £10 for new members

If you haven’t joined Top Cashback, then now is the time. There is currently a new member bonus of £10. To get the bonus, you need to click though this link and sign up. Once you have spent £10 on any website through Top Cashback you will get the bonus. It is pretty much free money! Currently if you converted the £10 into Avios you would get 1050 Avios. Not bad for a few minutes buying something you would have bought anyway!

Is TopCashback better for earning Avios than using the Avios or BA eStore?

A lot depends on the retailer and the amount of cashback and Avios on offer. Here are some travel companies and a comparison of the rates you tend to get with them:

Let’s take eBookers as an example. If you were to book a £200 hotel booking with them you would get around £26 in cashback. With the usual 5% bonus this would give you 2730 Avios or 3250 during a 25% bonus period. If you made the booking through Avios eStore, you would get 600 Avios. As you can see, TopCashback gives you far more Avios plus the option to take it as cash or part cash, if you prefer. As you can see, generally you get far better value through TopCashback.

Current Top Cashback bonus for members

To be eligible for the current £2.50 cashback promotion, you must already be a member of TopCashback.co.uk. You must activate the offer via the activation page,  and click ‘Activate Promotion’. You then need to make a purchase of £10 or more through TopCashback on any featured website before  23:59 GMT July 14th 2017. You will receive £2.50 additional bonus cashback on top of the usual cashback.

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Having found your bargain business class flight, most people book direct through the airline or someone like Trailfinders. It may be worth looking at 2 other websites before you make your final decision. In this article I will talk through a couple of recent examples that I have booked, as well as the pros and cons of each site.

Booking flights through ebookers

In October 2015, ebookers became part Expedia Inc. Despite being owned by Expedia, there are still some subtle differences. ebookers is normally my first port of call for hotel or flight plus hotel bookings. There are two reasons for this. First, they nearly always have one of the  highest rates of TopCashback for these type of bookings. The cashback is usually 10-12% for hotels, 4-5% for hotel+flight and 1-2% for flights. You can join TopCashback here. Secondly they also have their own loyalty scheme which adds to your savings.

ebookers BONUS+

It is free to join and points are earned at up to 5% on the booking cost exclusive of add-ons, insurance and payment fees. You get the highest rate on the app. You can redeem the points on qualifying hotels when paying by credit or debit card. As you spend more you get access to more perks. After 4 nights booked with Ebookers, you progress to gold.  As a BONUS+ Gold member you receive 1 free lounge pass per calendar year to 160 lounges worldwide through loungebuddy.com. Plus you are eligible to receive airline luggage fees reimbursed in BONUS+ up to the value of £20 as well as Wi-Fi once a year.

How to get the best savings

The majority of the time it is cheaper to book a hotel as well as a flight, even if you don’t need one. First select flight+hotel for your booking. If you don’t need a hotel, tick the box that says I only need a hotel for part of my trip. Then just select one night. It can be any night of your trip, so it could be worth playing around with a mid-week night versus a weekend, to see if one is cheaper. Then when the results come through filter by price. Often there will be a very cheap hostel as the first choice, which is fine if you won’t use it. If you actually want a hotel you can just select it for one night as well but select the hotel you actually want. You will now get the 4-5% cashback on the flight and the hotel plus the ebookers bonus+. Let’s have a look at my example.

Example

I have just booked a holiday to Vietnam in the latest Qatar sale. Despite the cheapest flight being out of Helsinki at about £1400, it actually made as much sense to book a UK flight through ebookers. By the time I had added on flights to Helsinki and an overnight stay it would have been around £250 extra bringing the total to £1600.

Here are the price comparisons:

I booked the option with a hotel for the first night of our trip, as we needed one anyway. You could look at the price I got in 2 ways. First, that I got the flight for £1668 and then paid £64 for a hotel, that would have cost £225.  You could also look at it taking the £225 hotel cost off, I actually got the flight for £1527. Obviously, at the time there was also the MasterCard 15% off through Qatar, but it did not apply to our travel dates.

If you had booked on your Premium BA Amex card on the BA website, you would have gained an extra 2790 Avios. If you took cashback instead, you could convert £22.25 of cashback to roughly the same amount and still pay £1710 for the flight with the cheap hotel offer.

The other lesson learnt from this is always check your codeshare options before booking a flight, as they are often cheaper!

You find Ebookers website here.

Booking flights through Expedia

Expedia has a couple of advantages over ebookers in certain situations. They also have TopCashback which is usually a bit lower at 8-10% for hotels, 3.5-5% for hotel+flight and 1% for flights. One thing to be aware of with Expedia is that if the airline charges for credit cards, Expedia will pass that onto you. This may not be obvious at the start. You can find a list of the fees here.

Expedia+

Expedia have their own loyalty scheme, but it is not nearly as generous as ebookers. You earn an Expedia gift voucher worth £25 off a hotel for every 3,500 points you get. Points are gained at:

• 2 points per £1 spent on hotels, packages with a hotel, activities, and select car hire flights
• 1 point per £5 spent

To get to the next tier, +silver, you need to spend £5,000 or staying 7 qualifying hotel room nights. This gets you some extra points and free amenities at select +VIP Access hotels.

Other advantages

Expedia’s big advantage is that it allows you to book your seats before you pay. It also seems able to override some airline booking restrictions for bulkhead and bassinet. This certainly worked when I booked my New Zealand ticket on Singapore airlines recently.

Another advantage that Expedia has, if only for research purposes, it that it works with 30k.com. I talked about this tool in this article. In short, you register your frequent flyer details and then use a google chrome extension. It will show you how many miles and tier points you will earn for every flight displayed on your search. Perfect if you need a certain amount tier points from a trip.

Finally you can earn and redeem Nectar points on Expedia at an earn rate of 1,000 Nectar points on packages and 200 Nectar points on flights, hotels and car hire. You redeem at 2,000 nectar points – that converts to a £10 Expedia voucher. This may be worth doing on smaller amounts and not the ebookers bonus.

Example

I booked a great deal to go to New Zealand with Singapore airlines from Stockholm at £2172, including a stopover in Singapore. If you remember Mrs C from this reader’s question, then you may be interested to know she has just booked the same deal and was quoted £3700 to go from the UK as the cheapest deal! Singapore have great business class seats but like BA, they are not all created equal. The bulkhead rows have a huge footwell compared to the smaller “cubby hole” type footwell on all the other seats. Singapore airlines block these off as they are bassinet positions. However, on Expedia we were able to secure these seats before we booked. We could still get moved but we have them for the moment.

We also got 1% cashback on the flights as well. Why didn’t we do flight+hotel?, I hear you ask. It was because we had to use the multi city option to factor in the Singapore stopover and you can’t add a part booking for a hotel to this. It is worth noting that Expedia does then offer you a discount afterwards on certain hotels.

You can find Expedia’s website here.

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