Did you know you can fly on British Airways, short-haul for only £1 or long-haul for as little as £100? Or that’s what they tell you, the catch is it’s an Avios flight, so you need to spend some Avios. But since you can earn them for free, it is still a very good deal. It’s called the Reward Flight deal and it’s designed to give you great value flights when spending Avios. But before you begin, you need some Avios points to spend.
Earning Avios
You earn Avios every time you fly on a normal ticket, i.e. not one bought with Avios, (using Avios to discount your flight doesn’t count, you still earn Avios then as well).
I have the British Airways American Express credit card and the Barlcaycard Avios card. For many years I’ve had the basic blue card AMEX which has no fees and has a number of benefits. I would earn Avios points for all spending on the card, and as long as I pay off my full bill every month, I didn’t pay any interest at all. It’s essentially free Avios! In addition to this if you spend enough per year, they will give you what they call a “companion voucher”. The idea of the voucher is to allow you to take someone with you free of charge on any British Airways economy flight, as long as you book it with Avios points. There was a change to the rules that allows you to use the voucher on your own and instead of taking someone with you, you get a 50% discount on the amount of Avios your flight is going to cost. I did for a while upgrade to the black version of the BA AMEX card which comes with increased benefits, including more Avios per £1 spent, but at the cost of an annual fee.
Note that the blue BA Amex card only allows you an economy seat with your companion voucher, if you have the black card, which comes with the annual fee, you can use the voucher in any cabin.
When I earnt my vouchers with the AMEX card, I switched over to using the Barclaycard Avios card, yet another way to earn while spending. Barclaycard also give you a voucher after a certain amount of spending.
Throughout the years I try to switch between credit cards, getting as many vouchers as possible, but always making sure I pay off my bill each month so I’m not paying interest. Essentially, earning me many more Avios for no cost to me.
There other ways of earning Avios, things like supermarket loyalty schemes that allow you to convert points to Avios etc. In doing all this, I earn a lot of Avios throughout the year, now it’s time to spend them.
Finding your flights
Note it if you’re going to book using the voucher you still need to book an Avios seat. There are limited numbers of Avios seats on every flight, so you have to find flights with availability. BA offer some tools to help you find flights with Avios seats, use their site to help you: https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/executive-club/spending-avios/reward-availability
Booking
When you’ve found suitable flights, go to the British Airways website and make sure you’re logged into your British Airways Club account. From the booking menu at the top click on “Book a flight with Avios”.
Now on the book with Avios tab. If you are going to use a voucher, this is where you pick it. It will show you the expiry dates. If you use an AMEX voucher for 1 person, like I have, you will get a 50% discount on the number of Avios this trip will cost you.
Then fill out the details of your trip and for the purposes of what I’m doing, change it to one adult. Hit “Get Flights” when ready.
On the next page choose your flights and you’ll see a calculation of the bottom of your payment options. You need to look for the flights with the “reward” symbol on them.
You’ll see there’s an option for more pricing options where you can pay more money and less Avios points. Sometimes, these deals aren’t always that good, but in this case I did the maths on it and most of them are roughly the same amount of money. What I do is convert the avios to cash and the add the amount they are charging to get my true price. Roughly I go by 1p per avios. So the main price we’re being offered here is £118.50. But even the least amount of avios here only works out at £119.
Note that these avios prices are 50% as I’ve used my voucher.
Now you can proceed to book your flights as normal. If you are using your AMEX voucher, one interesting catch I found is that you have to pay with your British Airways Amex card. Which means I’ll get one extra Avios for my booking anyway.
Bottom Line
The booking process was simple on this occasion as there were plenty of Avios seats, but make sure you do you research before making any plans. Using a voucher to get the Avios cost of the flight halved, or the option for 2 people to fly, this certainly gives you a very good deal on a flight.
What about long haul? Well, I did a quick search for you, a trip to New York in March would have cost me £100 with 50,000 Avios, (half the avios if I used my voucher), also a great deal!
