My girlfriend and I have been fortunate to win a holiday to New Zealand. The drawback is that we have to find our own flights. Yes, this is a genuine prize awarded by her company, not one of those annoying automated phonecalls !

We certainly aren’t frequent flyers, haven’t used BA yet and don’t belong to any airline reward scheme. However, we do nearly all of our shopping with Tesco and have a few thousand clubcard points which we can convert to BA Miles.

I have read through a lot of posts on this site and it looks like we can get BA flights cheaply/free using Tesco and Amex. However, I have some questions that I hope someone can help with. The plan in summary is to:

• Apply for an Amex Blue Card. Once received, apply for the Amex BA Premium Plus card. I understand that the BAPP card will give entrance to the BA Executive Club without having to buy an extra flight and that getting the Blue Card first will cut the BAPP annual fee from £120 to £30.
• Use the Amex BAPP card for most of our expenses (paying the full balance each month). Using that card will give us 1.5 BA Miles for every £1 spent.
• For every expense that won’t accept Amex, use a Tesco credit card. That card will give Tesco ClubCard points which convert to approximately 1.2 BA Miles for every £1 spent.
• Buy our food and petrol at Tesco (as we already do anyway), claim as many ClubCard points as possible and get them converted to BA Miles
• Once we have spent £10,000 on the Amex BAPP card, we get a 2-for-1 voucher.
• Use 100,000 BA Miles and 2-for-1 voucher to get 2 “free” World Traveller flights. I hoped to buy one ticket and use the BA Miles to upgrade to WT+, but the Amex site says that the 2-for-1 voucher is for use when BA Miles are redeemed on a British Airways flight so I guess we’ll have to do it this way.

I have a number of questions to help fill in the gaps:

1. Is it really as simple as this ?
2. Does anyone have any additional/better suggestions ?
3. How long does it take for the Amex 2-for-1 voucher to be sent after we reach £10,000 expenditure ? Is it sent after we reach £10,000 or after a year ("if you've spent £10,000 on your Card in one year")?
4. The BA website (http://www.britishairways.com/travel...r/public/en_gb) says “You will be able to book standard redemption tickets up to 3 days before departure where an e-ticket is available. (Longer lead times apply for a paper ticket.)”. Surely I’m misreading this - does this really mean that we would have to wait until 3 days before we want to fly to book our tickets ?

This is my first post here so sorry if I have made any faux-pas or asked any questions that have already been answered somewhere else on the site!