Head for Points

About Head for Points

Head for Points is the UK's biggest frequent-flyer and business-travel website, an independent publication devoted to helping British travellers maximise their airline miles, hotel loyalty points and reward credit cards. Founded in 2011 by former City financier Rob Burgess, it has grown from a personal passion project into a formidable media business with around 1.5 million monthly page views, a fiercely engaged community of readers, and genuine influence over the UK's travel-loyalty industry.

Founding by Rob Burgess

Rob Burgess spent 16 to 17 years working in the City of London, rising to become a partner at a major private equity fund, and travelled extensively for business. The analyst part of his brain, as he puts it, became fascinated with frequent-flyer schemes — extracting the maximum benefit from the smallest number of points — and he joined FlyerTalk, the world's biggest frequent-flyer forum, as long ago as 2004. When he left his finance job in 2011 and faced a long non-compete period, he spotted a gap: there was no UK website for business travellers and high-end leisure travellers who wanted to maximise their miles and points, even though similar sites were thriving in the United States.

He launched Head for Points during his gardening leave, and by the time the non-compete expired he was earning enough from the site to turn his back on the City permanently. What began as a hobby built on his own formidable points balances — he has held more than a million Avios, more than a million Virgin Flying Club miles and millions of hotel and credit-card points, and has redeemed a further 10 million over the years — became one of the UK's most successful independent digital publishing businesses.

What the site covers

Head for Points publishes daily news and in-depth reference articles on the loyalty programmes that matter to British travellers: British Airways' Avios-based scheme (now The British Airways Club), Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, the major hotel programmes such as Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, IHG One Rewards and World of Hyatt, and the UK's loyalty-linked credit cards from American Express, Barclaycard and others. Coverage ranges from breaking news — devaluations, bonus promotions, new redemption partners — to evergreen guides explaining how to earn points cheaply and spend them for maximum value.

The site's tone is famously direct and independent. Burgess writes with an analyst's eye for the maths of loyalty: which credit card earns at the best rate, whether a "sale" on reward seats is genuinely good value, when a programme change amounts to a stealth devaluation. That independence is a large part of its appeal — readers trust that recommendations are driven by the numbers rather than by commercial relationships.

Audience and community

Head for Points reaches around 1.5 million page views a month, and in 2023 it generated more than 29 million page views over the year, the great majority from UK readers. Burgess estimates the site has about 50,000 hardcore readers who follow most of what it publishes, alongside a much larger casual audience. Engagement is extraordinary by publishing standards: the site generates roughly 55,000 reader comments a year, and its comment threads function as a real-time forum where readers share data points, correct errors and debate strategy.

Burgess is fixated on the scale of the potential audience: some five million people in the UK hold a British Airways Avios account, and in theory every one of them could get value from the site. The publication's reach extends well beyond its own pages — Burgess is regularly quoted in national media, including The Times, and has appeared on the BBC and Sky News to discuss travel and loyalty topics.

The Head for Points Travel & Loyalty Awards

One mark of the site's industry standing is the Head for Points Travel & Loyalty Awards, its own annual awards event honouring the best loyalty programmes, credit cards and travel providers as judged by its expert readership. The awards bring together senior executives from airlines, hotel groups and card issuers, and winning — or losing — is taken seriously by an industry that knows the site's readers are among the most valuable frequent travellers in the country.

The event reflects an unusual dynamic: the programmes the site covers most critically are also the ones that court its audience most eagerly, because Head for Points readers are precisely the high-spending frequent flyers and hotel guests that loyalty schemes are designed to attract.

Editorial independence and industry influence

Burgess has won Editor of the Year at the Business Travel Journalism Awards, recognition of a style of journalism that loyalty-industry professionals describe as fundamentally honest. He has noted the irony that some of the UK's biggest loyalty programmes do not keep his team updated on their campaigns, even though his audience comprises the country's most valuable frequent flyers — a reticence he attributes to wariness of critical coverage, while insisting that criticism will be written anyway when it is deserved.

That independence has made the site a genuine force in the market. When Head for Points highlights a lucrative loophole or a mispriced award chart, programmes can see sudden surges in redemptions; when it calls out a devaluation, the industry listens. Few one-person-founded publications anywhere can claim comparable influence over a multi-billion-pound consumer market.

The business model

Head for Points is a commercial digital publishing business built primarily on affiliate revenue: when readers apply for a recommended credit card or book through a featured link, the site earns a commission. That model — standard among the American points sites that inspired it — has proved highly lucrative in the UK, funding a small editorial team around Burgess. The site is also a platform for brands seeking to reach affluent travellers, offering advertising and partnership opportunities to an audience that is exceptionally attractive to premium travel, finance and lifestyle advertisers.

Burgess also acts as a consultant to the loyalty industry, advising on the development of reward schemes that are attractive to consumers while remaining cost-effective for their sponsors — a natural extension of his analytical expertise.

Daily publishing and newsletters

The site publishes multiple articles a day, mixing breaking loyalty news with detailed "how to" guides, deal alerts and long-form analysis. A daily email newsletter delivers the top stories to subscribers' inboxes, and the site's archive of reference articles — explaining everything from how Avios pricing works to which hotel status is worth pursuing — functions as an encyclopaedia of UK travel loyalty that readers return to again and again.

The relentless publishing tempo is part of the formula: loyalty programmes change constantly, with promotions appearing and disappearing weekly, and readers rely on Head for Points to keep up. In a niche where being a day late can mean missing a deal worth thousands of pounds in travel, speed and accuracy are the product.

Why it matters

Head for Points has done for British travel loyalty what the great American points blogs did for the US market a decade earlier: it has taken knowledge that was once the preserve of FlyerTalk obsessives and made it accessible to ordinary travellers. In doing so it has arguably made the UK's loyalty market more competitive and more transparent, forcing programmes to reckon with an informed consumer base. For anyone in Britain who collects Avios, chases hotel status or wants a premium cabin for a fraction of the cash price, it remains the indispensable daily read — and a remarkable example of how a single expert voice can build a media business that punches far above its weight.

Visit the official Head for Points website