Deals of the week - 50% bonus, 10% off flights & more

British Airways and Qatar Airways are currently battling it out at the moment with a couple of promotions which may just be worth your while. Here's my round up of the best deals floating around the inter web this week. 

Swiss Air long haul business class from as little as £578

Swiss air are currently running a promotion where two people travelling from London can fly long haul in Business Class for a little more than Economy!

10,000 extra BA reward seats, £50 Novotel rooms, Virgin Atlantic status match

Heres this weeks round up of the best air-mile and hotel deals going around the interweb.

NOVOTELS £50 ROOMS

Just a quick post to let you know that at 5.50pm today Novotel will be selling hotel rooms in there UK hotels for £50 per night to celebrate there 50th year anniversary (this includes London hotels).

Click here to access the deal, there is not much details on dates or availability but worth a look at 5.50PM UK time today to see whats on offer.

10,000 EXTRA REWARD SEATS ON BA

Additionally British Airways have just released 10,000 extra reward seats for the Christmas and New Year period which means that there is a hole heap of seats available to places that were normally fully booked. Click here for the link and remember you can cancel your reward booking if needed for £35 fee (click here for more info on booking a reward flight with Air-Miles).

VIRGIN ATLANTIC STATUS MATCH

Finally If you have status with British Airways then Virgin Atlantic are currently offering a free status match and £50 on your first booking, all you have to do is prove your status with BA and show that you will be flying on a flight with Virgin Atlantic to receive this offer. Check out this offer here.

Want more offers like this straight to your inbox? sign up to my email subscription below to be the first to know.

How to book a flight with Airmiles or Avios

Its all very well collecting thousands and thousands of air miles but how do you actually find availability and maximise the value of your Avios?

A Camping Trip to Oban Live Music Festival

Kitted out with some new hiking boots and spurred on from last months Munro Bagging Jess and I were keen to head to the mountains. Picking Oban as a base, we started checking out some places to stay online and accidentally stumbled upon Oban Live - a Scottish music festival!

Buy cheap Avios via Tesco Direct (0.3p per Avios) + 1000 free Avios

Tesco are currently running an offer on HP ink cartridges where you will receive 1000 extra Tesco Clubcard points for each cartridge purchased. Is it worth it? YES!

THIS OFFER HAS NOW ENDED, SCROLL DOWN FOR 1000 FREE AVIOS 

Effectively buying Avios at 0.6p if you keep them and 0.3p if you sell them on (remember that buying Avios via BA or Avios.com normally costs 1.1 - 2p per Avios and thats during an offer).

Hiking Creag Meagaidh in the Scottish Highlands

Living in Scotland can be a nightmare at times, days of rain and wind confines most of the population to the local pubs (probably why we drink so much) but on the odd day when the sun comes out you remember what an awesome place Scotch Land is! 

A couple of weekends ago I signed Jess and myself up for a little walk and camping trip with some friends, I said "nothing to taxing since were total hiking amateurs". They took this as "we really want to do a hike that resembles an endurance boot camp". 

We set off from Glasgow at 7AM and headed north into The Highlands, taking a quick stop off at the Dalwhinnie distillery before heading towards Loch Laggan. 

Arriving in the car park you can imagine the shock on our face when we were told that the plan was a 27km hike over three Munro's (which is a mountain who's summit is 3000 ft or higher). Cheers guys.

It’s a fair walk in to Creag Meagaidh it took us around 2 hours to reach the wee loch at the foot of the Munro so after a little photo break we took on the first climb of the day.

It was only a matter of time before the flat, meandering path deteriorated into a scramble up a bolder field! We actually climbed up the side of the window to avoid all the loose rubble on the worst zig zagging path I have ever seen.

Eventually, lagging way behind our friends, we reached the top of the window and passed along some snow left over from the winter.

Three and a half hours in and we're starting to think we may be taking on more than we can handle! Letting our friends forge ahead we took some time to realise how super unfit we are. And for Jess to have a tantrum. Lessons were learned. Mountain climbing is hard. 

At this point we decided to abandon the other two Munro's and attempt to just reach the first Cairn (basically a pile of rocks at the peak) without dying. The path was again pretty rocky and our inappropriate footwear choice - gym trainers - didn’t provide much grip. Such amateurs.

Hanger brewing and tempers getting shorter we finally  reached  the plateau where we could see the Cairn! Excited for some lunch we powered on only to find that this was not the main Cairn and a smaller one a little further was the actual peak of Creag Meagaidh – cheers for that!

Another last push and a wee snowy ledge crossing later we made it to the peak.

After almost four hours of hiking we were building up quite the appetite, thankfully Jess was on hand with an awesome home made picnic and bailies coffee to refuel.

Happy with reaching the peak of Creag Meagaidh we left our friends to climb the remainder two Munro's while we made our way back down the way we came up.

The way down was hellish with trainers, thankfully it was sunny and the ground was dry or I think we would have cried and given up long before. It didn't get any better once we reached the loch, the track home felt like a never ending trail! 

We arrived back at the car park just after our friends (I'm convinced they took a shortcut) where we celebrated our victory with a few beers by the camp fire.

Big thanks to Calum & Rhona for taking us along, we had a great time and highly recommend this hike to everyone. Just don't do it in trainers!