Gargamel

Yesterday I received my final red letter from Airmiles, my account will be cancelled at the end of October if I don't collect 1 mile.

OK, I'll redeem 1,000 of my 1,006 total on a case of wine from Laithwaites.

£30 admin fee to claim my free case of wine !

What a bloody cheek ! I need to collect 1 further mile in order to be able to redeem anything without the admin fee.

beardedgeologist

Go to a Shell petrol station. Get a Shell card. Assign it to your AM account. Buy a few quid of petrol. At the end of the quarter, you will have got a couple of AMs, then get the case of wine without the £30 fee. Then throw away the couple of remaining AMs.

Only thing is you have to wait until the end of the quarter (which could be 30th Sept if you're quick & lucky).

Raffles

This is why its often worth having a spare Tesco voucher to hand to redeem!

Buy something from Air Miles shopping. The miles may or may not hit by the end of Oct but if the sale is showing as tracking they should cut you some slack.

Or buy some old paper Air Miles on ebay and convert those.

The free wine is probably rubbish so I would get a free flight instead!

Globaliser

You only need to collect 1 further Air Mile to be able to leave them all to rest in peace for 12 months!

One further idea: transfer 250 BAA WorldPoints from shopping to get 30 Air Miles - that will see you right for another couple of years. Start here - http://www.airmiles.co.uk/collect/ba...rldpoints-card - if you don't already have a WorldPoints card.

johnny5a

just buy a cd from cd-wow from the Airmiles shop, 1 mile - extends your miles and avoids the inactive service charge for getting a flight.

Gargamel

Cheers for the suggestions, I've just bought 10 paper miles from eBay to keep me going. Assuming these post ok, it might be worth buying a job lot to reach the next threshold rather than using them up on "cheap" wine.

Aerotec

I don't know where you are based but the 750 miles for a domestic flight EDI/ABZ/GLA/NCL-LHR/LGW is excellent value if you need to make a last minute booking. I have seen BA want £150+ for a round trip but managed to book it with 750 Airmiles (and this includes taxes, fees & charges). So I would try to get topped up to 1500 Air Miles so you have enough for two last minute tickets.

OPebble

Your use of "threshold" is concerning. As far as miles are concerned there are no "thresholds". It is the tier points that govern progression/retention from blue > silver > gold that have "thresholds". Tier points can only be gained by actually flying on BA/OW flights (with the exception of TATL flights - thanks US Anti-Trust regulators).

pmcg

Thanks for the heads up.

Mine were about to go into the dormant state so I've moved some BAA Worldpoints over to keep them going.

whkchan

You can also join e-rewards using the Airmiles account. You get some Airmiles for completing a survey within the first month or so, and you will just need to get at least 2000 e-rewards point every year to post some miles to the Airmiles account to keep it active.

Capvermell

Just to continue this thread from the start of last year I thought that I should inform you that the sneaky directors of Air Miles (led by Mr Andrew Swaffield) have now announced a date for the permanent expiration of the validity of any paper Air Miles that any of you may still have tucked away in a drawer somewhere.

No doubt some tight fisted accountant at BA paid a million pounds a year in salary has told them that this is an unquantifiable liability and therefore must be quantified and/or I suspect they simply hope that loads of people with paper Air Miles will lose them altogether since they quite deliberately have not bothered to write to or email Air Miles collectors to tell them of the upcoming paper miles expiration but only posted the information in the very bottom right corner of their website at www.airmiles.co.uk that you would have to scroll all the way down to in order to even notice as follows:-

There are fuller details on this at http://www.airmiles.co.uk/spend/pape...?from=homepage

However to my mind this is a disgrace on the part of Air Miles and BA (the parent company of Air Miles) as these vouchers were specifically issued with no expiry date and making them expire on less than a year's notice with no means to redeem them in to electronic miles after 30th November 2011 is equivalent to declaring a £10 note worthless after a certain date instead of in fact allowing to always be redeemed forever for a new one as is always the case with currency issued by the Bank of England.

So to my mind the directors of Air Miles are behaving far more like the directors of a banana republic with hyper inflation where one of the favourite tricks they usually pull is to declare all the existing currency worthless after a certain date unless you convert your old notes by that date.s