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5 days ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
A generous new cashback offer has returned on many American Express cards (except British Airways ones!) from United Airlines. You will get £300 back when you spend £700 with United Airlines – a 43% rebate if you find a ticket priced at exactly £700. You can fly direct from London Heathrow or Edinburgh. Other gateways may be available if you can get the United Airlines website to price them up with a connection. Cumulative spend is ok.
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6 days ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
Last night, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick teased a $10 billion order for Boeing planes from an unnamed “British airline”. My immediate thought was that this would be British Airways. 18 months ago, Bloomberg reported (paywall) that British Airways and Iberia parent International Airlines Group (IAG) was in contact with Airbus and Boeing about further widebody aircraft purchases.
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6 days ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
One of the quirks of Virgin Red, the central portal for earning and spending Virgin Points, is that it does not cover all of the Virgin Group brands. In fact, very few Virgin Group businesses are fully integrated, with Virgin Atlantic being the ‘anchor’ partner. This is a function of how the Virgin-branded operations are set up, with Virgin Group usually only having a minority equity stake and sometimes none at all.
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6 days ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
Last summer, Hyatt announced it was buying The Standard hotel group. Founded by Andre Balazs, The Standard properties are generally aimed at a young, hip audience, sitting somewhere (in my view) between Marriott’s W and Accor’s The Hoxton brands. There aren’t many of them, but they are in places where you may want to be including London, Ibiza, Miami, Bangkok, the Maldives, Melbourne ….
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2 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
This is our review of the new Al Safwa First Lounge at Hamad International Airport, Doha in Qatar. Last week, Rob and I took our first-ever joint trip – in six years of working together – to visit the Qatar Airways management team and try out the (genuinely gamechanging) new Starlink wifi service.
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2 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
When is a route not a route? When you haven’t flown it for 18 months. Despite Virgin Atlantic’s hopes of restarting flights to Tel Aviv during the recent ceasefire, it appears that the airline has accepted that it won’t be able to return any time soon. Virgin Atlantic launched its flights to Tel Aviv to much fanfare in 2019. I was on the inaugural flight with Richard Branson and the atmosphere was electric, particularly as this was CEO Shai Weiss’ hometown.
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2 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
Well, this is unexpected. Saudia, the Jeddah-based airline, has opened a new lounge in Heathrow Terminal 4. The airline has worked with Plaza Premium on the design, fit out and operation of the lounge. Plaza Premium previously took over the former SkyTeam lounge at Heathrow T4, opening up a new, larger Plaza Premium on the ground floor. At the time, we were told that the second level had been “reserved for other development at a later stage.” It appears that plan has now come to fruition.
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2 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
Regular readers should be fairly familiar with the citizenM hotel brand, given the amount of coverage we’ve given it on Head for Points over the past few years. citizenM first started as an airport hotel brand, opening its first property at Schiphol Airport in 2008. The select-service capsule-style rooms made a lot of sense for ‘value conscious’ passengers on early morning departures or very late arrivals.
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2 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
Last year, I wrote that 2025 would be the year of unlimited, fast and free inflight wifi. Qatar Airways is at the forefront of this charge, at least when it comes to long haul services, thanks to its progress installing Starlink wifi. Starlink is a network of over 7,000 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that supplies satellite internet services around the world. Whilst it initially launched as a terrestial home internet system, it is now available for aircraft installation.
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3 weeks ago | 
headforpoints.com | Rhys Jones
This is our review of the new Clubrooms lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3. The No1 Lounges group has opened a brand new Clubrooms lounge at Heathrow T3, hot on the heels of the recent No1 Lounge opened in Heathrow Terminal 2, reviewed here. Clubrooms is the most premium of No1’s three lounge brands, which go from My Lounge through No1 to Clubrooms.
