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How to use the upgrade voucher with the Lloyds Avios Rewards card

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One of the perks of the Lloyds Avios Rewards credit cards (my full review of the card is here) is the upgrade voucher.

On the £24 version of the card, you receive an upgrade voucher for spending £7,000.  On the £150 Premier version of the card, you receive a voucher for spending £5,000 – this lower target does not by itself justify the fee on the Premier card.

If you are a typically a solo traveller, the upgrade voucher may be more useful to you than the 2-4-1 voucher issued with the British Airways American Express card.

When I wrote about the upgrade voucher last November, I had some unanswered questions about how they worked.  As the cards were only launched last Autumn, we didn’t have any practical proof of what happened.

Reader Zark has just managed to earn and redeem his first upgrade voucher so we now know a bit more about them.

When you have earned a voucher, it will appear in your avios.com account.

From mid-2014 you need to redeem the voucher online – you can no longer redeem by phone

There does NOT need to be Avios availability in the orginal booking class, only the upgraded booking class.  Our guinea pig proved this by booking two business class seats on a European flight where no economy seats were available.  

(This is an important point.  Upgrade vouchers often require availability to be showing in both the base and upgraded categories.  This does NOT happen here.  In effect, what the voucher effectively does is let you book an Avios reward seat for the price of a reward seat one class lower.)

The voucher lets you upgrade (or get a discount on) one return flight or two one-way flights.  If you want to upgrade two one-way flights, they MUST be done in the same booking with both passengers travelling together.  You CANNOT upgrade one one-way flight now and another flight next month as the voucher expires as soon as it is used once.

(A HfP reader who just wanted to upgrade one flight, one way was able to do this by ringing the Avios call centre.  It used up his entire voucher but it was about to expire anyway.)

Whilst the voucher is only valid for 12 months, you only need to BOOK within this period.  Our guinea pig proved this by booking for mid 2015, way after the expiry date of his voucher.

There are some important insights here.  The key one is that there does not need to be availability in both classes, only the one you want to book in.   The knowledge that you do not have to travel within the 12 month validity period is also important.

This makes the Lloyds Avios Rewards card look more attractive.  If I spend £7000, I can effectively save 20,000 Avios on a Club World ticket to New York for example. This is a decent return.  For a family of three, you could use a BA Amex 2-4-1 for two people and then use a Lloyds Avios Rewards voucher to get a discount on the third person.

Note that you cannot use the voucher to redeem for a First Class seat. The highest possible class is Club World or Club Europe.

It is a pity that Lloyds didn’t do a better job of explaining how these vouchers worked eight months ago when they launched …..

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Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (46)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Anon says:
    15 Jul15 July 07:24

    Sounds similar setup to the Black Virgin Amex, (But you get 2x PE vouchers if you spend £10k per year)

  • Kipto says:
    15 Jul15 July 07:34

    Do you have to pay the extra taxes as well when upgrading ?

    • davef says:
      15 Jul15 July 08:45

      Nice of them to tell me I’d been awarded the voucher on the 1st May.

      The Ts&Cs state you’ll be informed by letter approx 4 weeks after it is applied to the account. It’s apparently been sitting there for 10 weeks and I’ve heard nothing.

      The Ts&Cs also say it can only be used online, but when you click on it, it says you can only use it by phoning the 0844 number.

      • Brian says:
        15 Jul15 July 08:54

        Avios have a number for calling from abroad – use that to avoid paying premium rates for 0844…

      • Lady London says:
        15 Jul15 July 13:34

        I thought only offering 08.. numbers and other numbers charged at a higher rate as the only way of contacting a company, has been or is very soon to be made illegal? I have noticed a couple of companies I always used saynoto0870 dot com to find ‘real’ non-surcharged landline numbers for, are now displaying regular numbers on their materials and websites instead of their formerly overcharged ones.

        • david flacks says:
          15 Jul15 July 13:52

          They’re changing for some institutions/companies but not all.

          BA Exec Club block calls to their 0191 local number from UK landline and mobiles, and I’m pretty sure Avios do the same to their 01925 warrington number as well. Cost me £7 last time I called them.

          Skype does work to the local number but the quality is usually horrible.

          • Alan says:
            15 Jul15 July 14:25

            Try putting 141 before the number – that withholds called ID for that call and is normally sufficient to get you past the usual ‘no UK calls’ block 🙂

          • david flacks says:
            15 Jul15 July 14:39

            Nice one. Must remember to give that a try.

          • Linda says:
            15 Jul15 July 17:03

            In answer to another query I used the 01925 number and was on for over 50 minutes it cost £4.65 . Linda

    • Rob says:
      15 Jul15 July 10:52

      Yes you would, although the big jump is WT to WT Plus as the APD jumps up. Only increase between WTP and Club World would be if BA has a different fuel surcharge.

  • Anon says:
    15 Jul15 July 08:05

    Are existing cardholders eligible for the upgrade voucher or is this restricted to new applicants.

  • Jfk says:
    15 Jul15 July 08:43

    I can confirm that you cannot use the upgrade voucher to upgrade economy tickets booked in the recent Avios sale. And you do pay the taxes associated with the higher class.

  • Craig says:
    15 Jul15 July 09:23

    Can you use the voucher for a one-way redemption starting outside the UK (e.g. NYC – LON)?

  • PJK says:
    15 Jul15 July 10:01

    Interesting that the £7000 spend has to be within 1 calendar year, according to the terms above … perhaps I won’t apply for this card until Dec / Jan now, instead of Sept as I had planned.

    I can’t imagine though that if I spend £6k by December and another £1k in Jan, that they’d withhold the voucher … would they?!

    Perhaps they meant, “within a consecutive 12 month period”.

    • Nick says:
      15 Jul15 July 10:38

      That’s a really good point! For a lot of people (myself included), it would mean that it’s not worth applying for the card after August, or maybe September at a push.

      However, for anybody who is good at manufactured spending, it does offer the opportunity to earn two vouchers either side of New Year.

    • Rob says:
      15 Jul15 July 10:55

      That does sound crazy, but then this is Lloyds we are talking about. I will do some digging.

      Someone must know though, as the cards were launched in October! Those who have triggered a voucher must know if the spend counted from 2013 or if it only started in 2014.

      • zark says:
        15 Jul15 July 13:53

        Raffles,
        I’m pretty certain the voucher was triggered after 6 months £7K spend between November 2013 & March 2014. I say I am pretty sure because my November/December spend was below what my spend was towards the end of March, but I think they wrote to me the day the £7K spend was triggered dating back to November.

      • Linda says:
        15 Jul15 July 17:19

        We got the rewards card in November and all spending counted from then.

        • Rob says:
          15 Jul15 July 21:35

          Thanks Linda, I thought as much …. the Lloyds T&C’s are clearly not to be trusted!

  • Linda says:
    15 Jul15 July 10:36

    I have also just redeemed my 1st upgrade voucher, we qualified in May but didn’t get any e- mail informing us of this. Had to ring up to check, the agent hadn’t ever redeemed one of these vouchers before, so had to put me on hold for a long time to clarify hat had to be done.
    I had been checking availability for some time as I knew we must be getting close with our spending. I knew there only had to be availability in the class you wanted to travel, we couldn’t get Club out only WT+ but managed Club back, have never flown BA before so it will be an experience in itself. It cost 150,000 avios and £1033 in taxes. I also took out a Lloyds Reward card when we had reached the £7,000 spend, so am nearly qualified for another voucher. We have cancelled OH card, we will also use the card for our forthcoming trip in Usa.
    We have booked Calgary for next May just out of the voucher year expiry on the new 787 Dreamliner, I was surprised how small the cabins are compared tot he 346 we normally fly with Virgin. I could choose my seats straight away, (haven’t yet) for a cost of £200, still thinking about this one. It was very easy to book once the agent knew what to do and they didn’t charge me any extra for booking over the phone or cc charges, the booking was available in MMB on BA straight away, anybody want any more info please ask . LInda

    • JPR says:
      15 Jul15 July 10:53

      Linda, just to clarify…… you use “we” and “our” in your post. Spending £7000 gets you 2 vouchers so were you able to use both vouchers on one leg (i.e. you and your partner) ? or I have I mis-understood.

  • squills says:
    15 Jul15 July 10:55

    3Vs feedback: tried a load in small batches at T yesterday and nearly all of them failed to activate, we had checkout girl & supervisor trying their best but the system is rubbish. Got 4, about 20 went in the bin.

    • Nick says:
      15 Jul15 July 11:50

      Are you one of the lucky ones that can pay a council tax bill with them, or have you found a sneaky way to monetise them?

      It’s really frustrating, I used to have totally foolproof way of churning them until a few months ago. Nothing to do with a change made by 3v, just a change in my personal circumstances. The fact that they are still rarer than hen’s teeth suggests that others can still use them! I still buy them when I do see them – It’s amazing how quickly you can get through them for normal internet shopping.

      • Nick says:
        15 Jul15 July 15:07

        Without wishing to give too much away, my method for getting through a chunk of 3vs at a time was based on very similar principles….

    • Lady London says:
      15 Jul15 July 13:38

      Being less flush with funds right now I can happily report I bought 2 yesterday without problems 🙂

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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