March 20th - The secret world of frequent flyer schemes
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Inside the secret world of frequent flyer schemes, credit cards with inbuilt perks and the joys of airport lounges, with Head for Points founder Rob Burgess.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and Rob Burgess, who is the founder of the Frequent Flyer website, Head Four Points. |
| 0:13.0 | And I'm going to be finding out all about loyalty and what it all means and this kind of hidden world that I don't know too much about, but Rob knows more, I think, than anybody else. |
| 0:24.0 | I've been doing this for about 11 years now, full time for about the last eight years. |
| 0:29.1 | Fundamentally, it's a website that helps people who are earning frequent fly miles |
| 0:34.8 | and hotel loyalty points in the UK, mainly from their job, often from |
| 0:39.1 | things like credit card spend, if they don't know a lot from work, to take those and to |
| 0:43.7 | maximise the value they get from them. It's a mixed coalition. A lot of our readers are |
| 0:48.1 | heavy business travellers, as you might expect. There's also quite a lot of self-employed people |
| 0:52.8 | who like to use miles and points to keep their travel costs down because they're self-employed to throw their money. |
| 0:58.7 | And then there's a growing sort of premium leisure segment. |
| 1:01.8 | Perhaps people who've retired or are indecent money, but still not the sort of money which lets them go out and buy four business class tickets for their family and so they |
| 1:11.8 | want to find ways of getting the cost down but still staying somewhere nice and flying in a nice |
| 1:16.8 | big seat and this kind of secret world you help to explain it and you make it sound a little as |
| 1:23.7 | though some people are using it simply to make their journeys a bit more comfortable. Others, it appears to be something like an addiction. |
| 1:31.0 | A lot of people treat this as a hobby. |
| 1:33.6 | And to be fair, if your hobby is finding a way of letting you travel the world in style and comfort, |
| 1:38.9 | that's not a bad hobby to have. |
| 1:40.7 | But yet, it cuts across a lot of people. |
| 1:42.8 | I mean, our website has quite a bit of content |
| 1:45.3 | about how to pick up air miles and hotel points cheaply offer free via various offers and promotions |
| 1:52.1 | that are going on. But we also spend a lot of time looking at the best ways to spend those |
| 1:56.8 | points, perhaps new hotels, which is opening, which offer good value, or, you know, |
... |
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