Cuba - Paid For With Printer Ink

How We Paid For It

I woke up my girlfriend one time on a trip to NYC (also paid for with points) at 4 o’clock in the morning, pacing the hotel room, phone in hand and shouting about points and printer ink. “Wake up, Les! Wake up! We need to to buy printer ink! Wake up! Where’s your phone?” Tesco was having a promotion on printer ink.

This was very exciting.

Ordinarily Tesco offer however many points per £ spent. However some poor kid in the website’s back office had put an extra zero on the end of how many points you got should get when you buy the ink. You now earned 1000 Clubcard points per ink cartridge (!) This nugget of info had been posted on the Head for Points website and subsequently every Av Geek and his dog were rapidly draining Tesco of their printer ink supply.

Within ten minutes, Tesco had completely sold out of all their printer ink, we had bought 28 cartridges for a total of £450 and also earned 28,000 Tesco Clubcard points. 28,000 Clubcard points translated into exactly 70,000 Virgin Flyer Club miles. Conveniently you need exactly 70,000 Virgin Flyer Club miles for x2, Premium Economy, return tickets to.....Cuba. Flights to Cuba had we bought them in “real” money would have cost £1500 per person / £3000 for both of us. Lesley had to explain to her Mum that we were late to breakfast because of printer ink.

In the end when the raft of printer ink was delivered to our house, (to the confusion of our flat mates - we don’t even have a printer) we managed to photograph the lot and sell it all on EBay. We had to pay £600 total in tax for the flights, but managed to recoup £250 from selling the ink on EBay. End result: Paid £800 and gained flights worth £3000.

Virgin Premium Economy

It’s worth noting that the seats on a Premium Economy Virgin Atlantic flights are the most cushty Prem Eco seats we’ve ever seen. They’re huge, totally dwarfing the average person. If you’re ever on the fence as to whether it’s worth flying Prem Eco with Virgin Atlantic - it’s worth it.

Virgin Rewards Plus Card

We didn’t have this card at the time, but recently found that Virgin also offer a card that gives you a companion voucher or an upgrade voucher after spending £10,000. There are very easy ways to get this without spending the £10,000. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to message me. More info on the card itself can be found here:
https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/credit-cards/…

Extra tit-bit

If you ever go to Cuba, buy this book to read on the flight. It’s written by a local and describes simple but (as we found) very effective tips you can follow to not look like too much of a ‘yuma’ in Cuba. It’s laugh out loud funny and you learn something on every page. My girlfriend Lesley bought it on Amazon, wanting to learn about the dual-currency system that existed in Cuba for tourists and locals but it turned out to just be a hilarious and useful read. We got hammered on the flight from London and read the entire book before we landed. She also messaged the author to say how good the book was and he ended up finding us our Casa Particulares - two friends of his called Cookie and Luchy. We realised when we left this meant “Cookies and Cream”.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/CubaConga-Winter-2017-…Read more