Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get £875 Iberia business class return tickets to Rio de Janeiro!

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In response to a KLM fare sale, Iberia has launched an aggressive £875 return business class fare to Rio.

This is a very, very good deal, and makes it worth cancelling any Avios redemption you have booked to Rio in return for an Avios and tier point earning cash ticket.

Here are the rules:

Iberia A330 350

You must book by August 15th

Your outbound flight must be before December 31st

You cannot route on BA flights via London but you can use TAM and potentially other oneworld partners.  You will probably be heading Amsterdam to Madrid to XXXXX.

One free stopover is allowed in each direction – this would allow you to stop in Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo, potentially.

You can book on iberia.com.  If you want to build in stopovers, start with iberia.com and then move on to expedia.co.uk if necessary and try their multi-city tool.  Remember that you MUST start your trip in Amsterdam.

Availability is good in November and tighter at other times.  The available flights clearly show at £400+ each way in the booking engine.

If you ONLY have Iberia flights in your itinerary and book on iberia.com, you can even use ‘part pay with Avios’ to reduce the cash cost further.  An ‘Avios discount’ logo appears next to qualifying flights on the Iberia website.  You need to move Avios into Iberia Plus to do this, which means having an ‘active’ Iberia Plus account over 90 days old.

These flights will earn Avios and tier points as Iberia is a BA partner in oneworld (and, of course, is owned by the same company).  Iberia’s business class product is very good these days and is arguably better than Club World.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Comments (32)

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

  • John says:

    Any idea how many tier points you get for ams-gig-ams? Also when I tried a dummy booking I had a message saying ‘the option to use your avios to save is not available on this flight’ is that because the ams-mad sectors are with Iberia express?

  • Alba says:

    Would it be possible to build a huge stopover between the short haul and long haul sectors?

  • Kinkell says:

    Sounds a great deal, just wrong timing for me. Am going to Rio in Feb, using 2-4-1 in First with BA, booked ages ago, AND I need to build up the TPs as have fallen out of Silver. Oh well, win some ……. Not this time!

  • Ronster says:

    This is a great deal. It would save me using avios, for a FRA-MAD-SCL redemption in J on LAN, to get there. I could then use the saved avios on seeing more of South America

    Also just bagged 4 club return tickets from OSL-LHR-JFK for £359 EACH. This was via BA’s Norwey home page. Deal is now dead.

    Ronster

    • Nick says:

      That New York price is amazing! Wish I’d known about that.

      • Rob says:

        Fat finger pricing error by BA which unfortunately happened when I was ‘off grid’ on Thursday and was over before I saw it.

        • Nick says:

          That’s a pity – it’s always better when these things are genuine fares as they might come back then. Do BA honour these deals once the error is realised? It looks a bit like a “palpable error” in betting, which would allow the bookie to refuse a payout.

          Still, great work, Ronster. That is absurd value – surely the cheapest CW ticket ever?!

          • Rob says:

            They have not been cancelled so far ….

          • Brendan says:

            You think that was cheap…SFO was only about £10 extra and you could get the a380 one way and the 747/321 sharklets the other way if you wanted. I’m kicking myself I didn’t book another trip now but I’ll have to settle for my MIA/MCO open jaw!

      • Danksy says:

        Blimey, that was cheap!

    • Scottnothing says:

      Thanks to a tip-off from an FT hawk I was fortunate enough to bag that deal as well: OSL-LHR-MIA // MCO-PHL-LHR-OSL in Club which nets 400 TPs for under £350 and for the added nerd factor, I get to try the new AA business class on the 77EW.

      On Friday I booked OSL-LHR-HKG-SYD-SIN-LHR-OSL for Easter next year which nets 660 TPs for £1732. It’s the first time I have seen sub-£2,000 J fares to Australia since I started reading HFPs 2 years ago, so am quite chuffed. Thanks for all your hard work Raffles!

      • Brendan says:

        I booked a similar trip OSL-LHR-MIA-MCO // MIA-LHR-OSL for Easter but only realised after that both TATL legs are scheduled in the old 772 which I’m a bit bummed about! Hoping for an equipment change or at least a retrofitted 772 (although doubtful considering the slow progress and the fact that MIA is probably a high yield for premium passengers and the retrofit gets rid of first class)

      • Mark says:

        Are those oslo-sydney prices available until a particular date or is it ongoing for now?

        • Alan says:

          Particularly good prices just now, but they’ve been sub-£2k for about 9 months or so now ex-OSL, seems a fairly long-term price.

        • Scottnothing says:

          I think I read somewhere on FT that the current ex-OSL to SYD fares had to be ticketed before 7 September. Don’t quote me on that, as I may be getting confused with another promotion. I had been seeing prices around £2,000-2200 for about 9 months but not as low as £1732, which was why I jumped. ITA Matrix is still showing £1732 available up to April next year.

  • Marly says:

    Really good deal!!! Better than the BA Club world sale that will happen (being really hopefull here) in late november as they did for the last couple of years where you can score Club World for around £1000 return in those destinations…
    worth considering indeed…

  • Firstclasslad says:

    I can’t seem to include the free stopover to Buenos Aires on the way back::

    AMS-MAD-GIG
    GIG-BUE-MAD

  • Ronster says:

    Thank you Nick

    I was extremly lucky. In a moment of boredom I went onto the Flyer Talk forum. I had to rub my eyes at what I was seeing. That is one of the best Fat Finger rates I have ever seen!!

    I saw the announcement just under an hour after it had been posted. With some birthday and business trips in nyc, lined up over the next 6 minths, I bought all I needed.

    Thanks again Rob for that Iberia tip

    Ronster

    • Polly says:

      Could we please ask if you spot a fat finger J flight like that again, could you PLEASE post it here for the likes of us who don’t check FT as much as you do. We would have loved a cheap J trip to NYC. And a trip to OSLO too thrown in…What a fab lucky chance you managed to take advantage of. Well done to you all.

      • Rob says:

        I was frustrated myself to miss it – I was taking my daughter to Germany to stay with a friend so I had a ‘wake up, dress, taxi, flight’ morning which meant I did little more than check my emails until I got to my hotel in Dusseldorf (review to follow) about 7 hours later.

        • Polly says:

          Hi Raffles, sorry you missed out on the deal also. No my email was aimed at the lucky three who got the cheapo deals as Ronster, Scott and Brendan. Wish you guys had posted it in BOLD for the likes of us, if you had a minute to spare after you had done your own bookings. Like the moment I got that QR sub 1k email, I posted it in BOLD, and lots of people on this site took advantage. Some even cancelling their 241 long haul, like we did to KUL and bought ex CPH Instead. Just fantastic if we could have got that deal. aw well, as they say, we won’t see the likes of that again, for a while. Still thrilled some people got to benefit though….

          • Rob says:

            I am re-thinking the idea of a HFP forum at the moment, because I have found a software package which I like. Let’s see ….

      • Scottnothing says:

        Much to my surprise, I received the following email from BA at lunch time today:

        “It has come to our attention that for a short period of time there was an obvious pricing error for business class seats from Norway to a number of US destinations. The correct prices have now been reinstated. Your recent booking was concluded on the basis of the invalid fare, which may have been up to six times lower than the actual fare for that journey, and ordinarily that booking would be void. However, we have decided in this instance we will allow you to travel the full itinerary as planned.”

        I suspect we will not be seeing many more BA “sales” like that one.

  • Ronster says:

    I’ve often thought if an early warning special deal, flyer talk app could be available?

    The moment special deals appear, you would receive a quick text.

    In the same way Award Wallet texts you when various hotel or air line balances change.

    I would certainly consider paying a premium for this.

    Ronster

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