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We’ve written about specialist hotel booking cashback site EarnAway a couple of times before when it has been running decent promotions.

I received an interesting email from them yesterday outlining a change from traditional cashback to what they are calling ‘AwayPoints’ on Wednesday 19th October.

Don’t worry – this actually looks to be a positive change! You won’t lose any value, “100 AwayPoints will be worth £1.00 in value of your chosen payment method. However, and here is the good bit, some payment methods will offer you a bonus top up to select their method so you could gain even better value”.

EarnAway explain the reason for change as follows, “Moving to AwayPoints has enabled us to bring more booking partners into hotel search (Expedia, Hotels.com and ebookers will now all provide hotel prices within the search comparison) and also enables us to negotiate better options for our members when it comes to exchanging their points, for example, if you exchange your points for an Amazon Gift Card, you receive 2% more than you would if you earned cash. Every little helps :)”.

What I find particularly interesting about the change though is where they list what you will be able to redeem AwayPoints for, “you can exchange your AwayPoints for cash into your bank or PayPal account, Amazon Gift Cards or a range of shopping / restaurant gift cards and air miles (coming soon).

For a long time, TopCashback had a considerable competitive advantage over other cashback sites due to the (now defunct) ability to transfer cashback to Avios and Virgin Flying Club Miles at a generous rate via Tesco Clubcard. TopCashback were clearly very aware that the removal of this option hurt them and recently introduced a 25% bonus for direct transfers to Avios, which effectively allows you to buy Avios for 0.8p each.

It now looks like EarnAway have cottoned onto this trick as well, and will be bringing forward a similar transfer option/s. I’ve contacted EarnAway to see if they’re ready to divulge any further details about this yet, and will report back anything noteworthy.

It’s worth bearing in mind that EarnAway is actually a spinoff division of popular cashback site Quidco, so it’s very possible that there could be changes afoot there too.

The more options there are to earn cashback, and the more options there are to get value from that cashback, the better. I’m very interested to see what EarnAway/Quidco have in mind!

If you don’t already have an EarnAway account, you can sign up through my referral link here to get a £5.00 bonus after your first booking (I also receive £5.00 credit, so thanks!).