Brainstorm... How to get Asia miles/ credit card points quickly?!

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  1. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gweilo86:
    What about silver rounds or bullion?

    If you're flying back to the UK, I would have thought you'd be able to sell them easily enough as there's the 20% VAT on top of the market price usually. Would be quite heavy though, and you'd have to go through the hassle of claiming that they're expensive poker chips to avoid any import taxes.

    Or what about topping up online poker credits?

    You could spend the money and then just leave it in your account until such a time as you want to transfer it back?
    Maybe a good idea regarding the gold! (It's a good investment anyway if all fails) Poker isn't possible with hk card. You seem to have poker on the mind!

  2. #12

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    Could you not top up by credit card via neteller? Actually... if you can, you might be able to avoid the poker sites altogether?

    Hong Kong Poker Deposit - Hong Kong Poker Sites

    You could also think about buying tickets for popular events (such as the 7s) and selling them on...


  3. #13

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    Remember that you still have to pay fuel and other taxes even on AsiaMiles tickets, and they're about a third of the price these days!

    Jet Airways currently have seats on random days I selected in August for HK$4640 + taxes. Good short connections in Mumbai in both directions.

    Last edited by PDLM; 16-07-2011 at 01:17 AM.

  4. #14

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    Hmm PDLM as you can tell I'm a beginner with these air miles... I didnt even know that you had to add for the taxes.

    In that case, the 70,000 Asiamiles for an upgrade to business class seems like a bargain in comparison. Any hidden costs there?

    Last edited by justjoe86; 16-07-2011 at 02:58 AM.

  5. #15

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    Indeed - I generally use miles for premium classes (either as upgrades or as full purchases). If you're buying an upgrade then there isn't generally any additional tax to pay, but there are exceptions. And London is one of them - the UK has one departure tax for economy class (£75 to HK) and a higher one for any higher class (£150 to HK), so if you use miles to upgrade from the UK you also need to pay £75 extra tax.


  6. #16

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    Often the taxes are a huge part of the flight cost. Typically I either start my flight in Taiwan (for much cheaper flights to UK, Aus, USA in Biz class) or purchase an economy ticket and use points to upgrade. This trip I'm doing on of each (TPE - LHR return; LHR - USA with upgrade).


  7. #17

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    I just made an interesting discovery... By buying some shower gel in parknshop, i could get a business class upgrade hk-london for $18,600hkd.... Hear me out while i try to explain it!...

    Firstly, I should note you can change moneyback points (parknshop reward card) to asiamiles at a rate of 4mbps to 1am.

    Usually if you spend $4 in parknshop you get 1mbp, but they have a crazy deal on some watsons showergel and other cleaning products... Buy one bottle for $35 and get an extra 500 points.

    this means $1 buys 3.63 asiamiles from mbps. ((500+8)/35)/4)
    also my credit card gets 0.14 asiamiles per dollar...

    So that is 3.77 asia miles for $1.

    Since a business class upgrade is 70,000 points, it will cost me $18,567hkd! (70,000/3.77)

    Plus, I'd be the cleanest man in the world because of my 216,000ml of shower gel!

    Obviously theyre unlikely to have 540 bottles in stock and might wonder what the hell i'm doing buying them... but it's a thought. What it implies to me is that i should at the very least buy enough watsons showergel to last a year or 2!


  8. #18

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    Do you get points on your credit card for making payments to your neteller account?


  9. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gweilo86:
    Do you get points on your credit card for making payments to your neteller account?
    Doubt they'd be stupid enough to let you do that. Or if you did, you'd lose money in the conversion fees.

    I'm enjoying my hunt for an easy asiamile... sad i know... clearly too much time on my hands

  10. #20

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    It's an OK deal, but not stunning. Find something for about a quarter of that price and you might get a film made about you.

    For what it's worth, the best deal I ever found was to buy 100 subscriptions to a magazine for US$6,000 which got me enough miles (in this case Qantas Miles, via Starwood Preferred Guest) for three round trip first class tickets between HK and London. That sort of opportunity doesn't happen very often.

    Last edited by PDLM; 16-07-2011 at 11:34 PM.