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The British Airways shopping portal is currently doubling reward rates and this has created an excellent potential opportunity to buy cheap Avios!
You can normally earn 75 Avios per $1USD for subscriptions to the US version of dating site Match.com, but for the next few days that is doubled to 150 Avios per $1 , so ~183 Avios per £1. That works out at about 0.55p per Avios, which is an excellent price.
How to (possibly) buy cheap Avios
Well first, make sure you tell your partner why you are signing up to a dating site!
Then, head over to the Match page on the BA shopping portal. If you have any problems finding it once you login to your BA account, make sure that you have clicked from the UK version to US version at the top right of the page:
After that, you should just be able to click through to Match.com and purchase whatever subscription you like. Unfortunately, whenever I click through, the Match.com site defaults to the UK version rather than the US site – and that could be a potential spanner in the works. The Avios offer appears to be for the US site, but when you click through their link it takes you to the UK site. I would personally be prepared to fight it if the Avios were denied for that reason and would expect to win, but it could certainly be a bit of a hassle.
Regardless, I would strongly recommend taking screenshots of every part of the process so you have records, in case BA or Match tries to renege on the offer.
In fact, if you happen to have any friends or family in America I would actually ask them to do this for you, to minimise any risk.
NOTE – the terms are clear that “the stated reward is for first-time Match.com paid subscriptions only”.
If you want to buy lots of cheap Avios and are prepared to take the risk, simply repeat the process for each member of a BA household account and/or take out an eHarmony subscription too at the slightly less generous rate of 130 Avios per $1, ~ 0.633p per Avios.
Bottom line
There are always some risks with these sort of offers (will it track properly, will it be honoured etc), and this one more than most – but the reward here makes it worth considering. If you do decide to try it, be sure to take lots of screenshots and be prepared to fight your corner if required.
Why might they refuse to honour the Avios ?
Are there rules about being in the U.S. or a U.S. resident to sign up to the U.S. version of match.com ?? Or rules designed to prevent you using the American Avios shop to get Avios into a UK account ?
I see 2 main potential issues. 1) It’s an extremely generous offer – so good that they may have second thoughts and try not to pay out (scummy behaviour, but some companies still try it sometimes). 2) More significant is whether it tracks properly. Again, there shouldn’t be a problem here in theory but reality can be different and if it doesn’t track, chasing it up could be a hassle.
Getting an error message 🙁
Once I have clicked on match.com in the estore & then clicked again to continue on the warning popup telling me I’m about to leave the estore and go to match.com, I get an error message 🙁
Invalid Publisher Code, Offer, or Publisher – Advertiser Partnership Status
From this URL that I’m taken to:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=DaMj/jjM5ZY&offerid=185950.10000079&type=3&subid=0&u1=164159769
That’s the exact same error I got eventually but this only happened after I backed out of the subscription at the very last moment (and I closed the window).
When I went back to see if it would work via a different method I could no longer get a redirect to match.com
If you still want to sign up you could try with a fresh browser session (clear all cookies and history) and then redo it. Personally I decided to bail as I had similar doubts to you about using the US site for US-only offers.
Just use a VPN and set your country to US – then you’ll be redirected to the US match.com site. You may need to start a fresh browser session with cookies cleared before reattempting.
Personally although it looks tempting it didn’t really work out for me. You need a US postcode to register and when you get to the payment part to put in your credit card details this was already filled in. So there’s now a mismatch in your billing address but it needs to be a US style zipcode to work. I checked the paypal option but the US one needs linking to a US bank account. If you try to trick it by exiting the VPN – so that you now get a PayPal UK login – it comes back with a merchant error code after trying the login (presumably it flags the UK Paypal login as iffy).
Even though I could have tried other optIons I decided that apart from the effort involved it was too risky if the points didn’t get posted. To fork out over $200 is fine if the avios eventually appear but if they don’t it sounds like it would be quite complicated chasing it up and trying to explain that you signed up for a US-only dating service (via the US avios site) when you’re registered BAEC address and CC billing address is UK. I don’t have the connections that some of the people writing for this site have so pulling rank isn’t going to get me anywhere!
Oh and BTW, if for whatever reason you interrupt the sign up process and leave the site before completing the subscription payment then you’re likely screwed. I did this on purpose for reasons described above and when I went back to the avios site to check it the ‘Shop Now’ link wouldn’t work – it gave an error presumably due to it thinking that I was a not a first time customer (I’d added some barebones details and got to the final checkout page) even though I never actually subscribed!