The madness continues …. Iberia’s ‘90,000 Avios points for £200’ ends tonight. Let’s do the maths.

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• Devin says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:00

  Does Iberia metal fly anywhere from London besides Madrid?

  • Rob says:

    24 Jun24 June 09:22

    No. Iberia Express used to, not sure if it still does.

  • AndyR says:

    24 Jun24 June 11:52

    I think Iberia Express still fly to Asturias, Gran Canaria, Palma de Mallorca from LHR.

• Steve says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:07

  Hmm just noticed in my Miles&More account 1 mile added the other day, labelled as Miles Protection. Any idea what this is?

  • Rob says:

    24 Jun24 June 09:18

    I got this. I am GUESSING they are giving it to credit card holders to keep their accounts alive.

    • Steve says:

      24 Jun24 June 09:45

      For how long though?

    • RussellH says:

      24 Jun24 June 13:07

      I got it too. Five days after getting 8 miles on my LH Amex and 18 days after getting 4 miles on my LH Visa. Currently have 11 849 miles and 100 pending…

• Doug M says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:13

  What will be interesting is how the Avios are handled IT wise. Will they be able to claw back negative balances from the account they were moved to, assuming moving them is possible and they’re not locked in somehow. Will these be ‘tagged’ Avios, not available for hotels or cars, which must have a real cost outside of IAG. They must have some confidence in controlling them, assuming a real IB account they have to use these Avios first against overal balance, whilst possibly adding in new Avios, they can’t just use LIFO as that would still reduce added Avios ahead if these. Either they’ve serious confidence in how they’ll operate this, or they’ll be facing months of IT hassle and customer complaints.
  I only had an IB account following advice from here and the possibility of a lower tax redemption. To be safe I emptied it ahead of the fun and games to come.
  Hoover?

• Felix says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:14

  On the homepage it allows me to book until 20 Jun but on the offer page it says I can only book up to 330 days from today. Is there a catch here? or just an error
  (it also doesn’t allow me to book 1/5/2019 on the offer page, which falls in the 330 days period…)

• B R says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:20

  Group psychology is fascinating – we’re seeing the situation now where people are seeing other people apparently get something and are piling in to try and get the same or more, “signing up the dog” to an account. Also I think known as the “widows and orphans” phase where caution goes to the wind and everyone jumps onboard. What is happening now is that people are starting to ignore the “website bookings only” part of the T&C and the regional restrictions, and the fact that new accounts don’t really have an IB number for 72 hours, and going in for multiple accounts which starts multiplying up the 28 euros into quite large amounts of money. Voices suggesting a measured and cautious approach are shouted down too.

  What will happen next? Not good for the consumers one way or another. Scenario 1 is that IB had a masterplan to limit exposure, and that will cut in. Most likely this is around some form of redemption restriction, strict transfer controls, or devaluation (or combination of the three).

  Scenario 2 is that this was marketing driven, and the rest of the business leadership is on a weekend. Marketing departments may be patting themselves on the back at going massively viral and the sales numbers shooting skywards, but in the cold light of Monday morning when the Finance team gets in I would expect a few crisis meetings. In this scenario, there are essentially 10 days to limit damage. This will be a hastily constructed version of (1), but the following considerations are true:

  1) PR damage is less damaging than balance sheet damage. There is the potential for this to have a serious balance sheet impact (I think the numbers in the article are probably underestimated). That conditions the way Iberia would approach the issues.

  2) The first thing that will be looked at is strict T&C – Amazingly Iberia didn’t insert an “abuse” clause in the T&C and in fact were at pains to encourage “abuse” (multiple purchases without an intention to travel), so this will be difficult, but the most obvious clause is the “must use by Dec 1” and to prohibit transfer outside (or make the points dissolve if transferred). They have 10 days to create an IT solution to this problem but it’s a one line of code job to prohibit all transfers for a while to buy a little time.

  3) Other T&C that can be applied are “website bookings only” and “must have a valid IB number at time of booking”. The latter may exclude a lot of pets.

  Note that the value of the Avios is effectively reduced by restricting redemptions, and the “destroyed” avios on 1st December (conveniently within the second half of the financial year) is refunded from the Avios group, thereby disappearing from the balance sheet. Avios redemptions are intrinsically limited anyway, so if it is impossible to use these elsewhere, it’s a nice sleight of hand to boost the first half results using leprechaun gold.

  In either scenario, consumers aren’t getting what they might expect from 90,000 avios. Money only has value if you can spend it. Personally I think the speed of the reassurances on Friday evening tends to confirm the belief that there is some risk management behind it, i.e. we are in scenario (1) rather than (2) but it’s controlled.

  I don’t want to be a killjoy voice of doom, and I have skin in the game as I’ve taken a few flights on – albeit not the cheaper ones, I’m doing a few round trips to Madrid and a little tour via Seville for a weekend. But I’ve seen these feeding frenzies before and they rarely end up well.

  • Devin says:

    24 Jun24 June 10:19

    I have a hard time believing that this type of offer would not have required senior management approval, and surely senior management in the avios/marketing/it departments would have predicted a similar outcome. (maybe not some people opening lots of fake accounts, but certainly real people booking cheap flights with no intention of travel). Therefore I would agree that they must have some sort of strategy. The T&C of this offer were so limited that IB will have some difficulty restricting based on those, but they could always change the T&C’s of the Iberia plus at any point, something like “avios earned during a promotion can only be used to fly on Iberia”?

    Where does this 72 hours come from? I signed up my partner on Friday evening and had an IB number instantly. I did have difficulty booking initially, but 72 hours to propagate throughout the back-end systems is not the same as not having an IB number.

    • Rob says:

      24 Jun24 June 12:04

      Look at the Virgin Money insurance deal. Someone signed that off too. Just someone not very smart in the ways of how loyalty schemes work.

      • Devin says:

        24 Jun24 June 14:43

        True, but that was a much smaller giveaway and takeup and still pulled relatively quickly. This is a huge giveaway and seen enough interest to crash the site multiple times. They must be aware by now of what is happening and are still allowing it to continue.

  • marcw says:

    24 Jun24 June 10:31

    IbPlus team has been working for a time on this promotions. Some details of the promotion got leaked a few weeks ago. Obviously, no one believed it at that time, but once it went on-lin, god hell, yes, it was all true.

    The marketing team is behind this interesting promo.

• Andy says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:21

  I haven’t had a look on the Iberia site but is there an option to transfer points out to Avios.com? My account is still open and I can’t do them direct to BA because it’s a family account.

• JT says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:22

  It smells like Avios devaluation is coming !

• Frenzie says:

  24 Jun24 June 09:30

  Hello Rob,
  You said that it is not possible to transfer these bonus avioses to BAEC Household account.
  I have just transferred 400 avios from Iberia to BAEC household account using avios.com .

  • Lumma says:

    24 Jun24 June 09:59

    He was saying that the closure of the avios.com accounts is imminent and you might not have the option later to do so

  • Rob says:

    24 Jun24 June 12:09

    You can do it via avios.com but that won’t exist in 4 weeks. It will presumably still be done via Aer Club and Vueling Club.

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