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‘Part Pay With Avios’ now available on Flybe – at a poor rate

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Flybe is, impressively, now the largest regional airline in Europe.  It now operates from 40 UK airports and is the largest scheduled airline by air traffic movements at Belfast City, Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter, Isle of Man, Jersey, Manchester, Newquay and Southampton.

Back in 2014, Flybe abandoned its own reward scheme and adopted Avios as its reward currency.  A lot of people still do not seem to know that this feature exists, especially when it comes to redeeming Avios points on Flybe.

Earning Avios on Flybe cash tickets can be surprisingly good these days compared to taking a British Airways Euro Traveller flight.  On routes where Flybe and BA compete at London City, you are likely to earn more Avios taking Flybe.

Flybe and earning Avios

The cheaper ‘Just Fly’ and ‘Get More’ ticket types on Flybe earn 2 per £1 / €1 spent.  ‘All In’ flexible tickets earn 4 per £1 / €1.  As well as the base fare, you can also earn Avios on whatever you pay for hold luggage, standard and extra leg room, preassigned seating and Flybe Flex.  However, you will not earn anything on ‘Government charges’, primarily APD.

There are a couple of oddities to earning Avios on Flybe cash tickets:

You will only receive your points when you have flown your return journey.  The outbound points will not be posted after the flight.  If you miss one flight on your itinerary, you will forfeit your Avios points for the entire trip.

You can only credit a Flybe flight to avios.com.  This means that earning Avios on Flybe is restricted to residents of the UK, Isle of Man and Channel Islands because those are the restrictions on who can have an avios.com account.  You also need to be over 18 to earn Avios from a Flybe flight.

The only exception is if you have booked a British Airways codeshare with Flybe under a BA flight number.  You can credit such flights to British Airways Executive Club.

NEW – Use your Avios to part-pay for Flybe flights

Flybe announced yesterday that it is now offering ‘part-pay with Avios’ on its flights.

Full details can be found on this page of the Flybe website.

Whilst I always welcome additional opportunities to use Avios points, it is difficult to get excited about this option. 

The minimum redemption is 1,500 Avios which will get you £7.50 off your ticket.  The maximum redemption is 4,500 Avios which will save you £22.50.  That works out at 0.5p per Avios point which is about as poor as you can get.

These redemptions can only be made from an avios.com account and not a ba.com account.  You can use ‘Combine My Avios’ to move your points across to avios.com in order to do this.

There are three upsides as far as I can see:

The cap of 4,500 Avios is per LEG.  This means that you can actually use up to 9,000 Avios on a return flight, saving up to £45.  (A connecting flight only counts as one leg, so A-to-B-to-C is one leg although A-to-B-to-A is two legs.)

You can use Avios against the full cost of the ticket if it is cheap enough, albeit not for ancillary purchases such as car hire or travel insurance

You will continue to earn Avios back on your ticket, even if it was bought using ‘part-pay with Avios’

If you want to check out where you can fly to using Flybe, the full route map is here.  They even fly to Barra in the Outer Hebrides where the planes land on the beach – this is one of those trips that I keep intending to do just to be able to share the experience on HFP but I never get around to it.  Maybe next year …..

If you want to learn more about SPENDING your Avios points on Flybe, you should read this ‘Avios Redemption University’ article here.

You can read more about ‘part-pay with Avios’ on the Flybe site here.

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.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

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.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (69)

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

  • Genghis says:
    25 Oct25 October 14:28

    Hi Tangey. I’d really like to take my wife to Rangali. Care to share how you got there / advice on HH points usage etc? Many thanks.

  • Tilly71 says:
    25 Oct25 October 14:46

    VA clubcard auto convert points are in, no bonus this time though!

    • Graeme says:
      25 Oct25 October 17:39

      virgin Red app is saying 10% bonus on first time conversion, and 1000 miles when you turn on auto convert, both between 1October and 13 November. States auto convert bonus is one time only, but I am sure many will agree this is not the case 🙂

      • mark2 says:
        25 Oct25 October 17:41

        I have certainly had the Virgin auto convert bonus many times and others have too.

  • Scottydogg says:
    25 Oct25 October 16:56

    I live on the Isle of Man and Flybe flight to a few routes from here but are really bad at keeping to time and always cancel flights . They are known locally as FlyMaybe and I try and avoid them as best I can

    • Keith says:
      26 Oct26 October 14:12

      I flew Flybe once a few years ago – never again! I carefully packed my hand baggage to the weight limit, and I had a ‘standard cabin bag size case’. At check in I was asked to put it in their measuring frame, which of course it didn’t fit, so it was taken off me. When I checked later, the dimensions were hidden away in small print on another page of their website (maybe changed now).

      We waited for our delayed flight, which was eventually cancelled. They transferred us to another flight, boarded and pushed back… and waited… and waited… eventaully we moved back onto the stand for theme to rectify a problem. More delay. I can’t remember how late we finally left, but I vowed never to use Flybe again – and haven’t.

  • David says:
    25 Oct25 October 21:25

    …yes, when I saw flybe on here, I thought I must post. Flybe is ok as an airline, but the reward scheme is pointless, utterly pointless. I have taken numerous flights and pretty much all the points have never posted. You just know when you use their website, if this is the amateur image they want to portray, then the reason no one gets points is probably because Susan keeps forgetting to add them to the MS Excel spreadsheet. Which reminds me, anyone got thoughts on what I should do with my 672 miles?

  • Chris says:
    25 Oct25 October 22:26

    2 questions:

    1. Why is it always part-pay and not ‘full-pay’ with Avios?

    2. Why can’t BA introduce part-pay for the YQ or RFS on redemption tickets? After all, revenue is revenue.

    • Callum says:
      26 Oct26 October 01:50

      1. Reward seats are “full pay with avios”.

      2. Because that would cost them a lot of money? Revenue isn’t revenue when you’re swapping a low value reward currency into cash!

  • Alan says:
    26 Oct26 October 09:59

    OK, so it seems that you probably won;t get any miles for flights taken with Flybe but for collectors of small amounts of Avios the part pay option can be quite good. After all, its probably better to get 0.5p per point than to let them expire and get nothing. I accept the point that people on this blog probably aren’t minor collectors of points and so this probably isn’t a good option for them but there are plenty of people about where this might be a reasonable way to use up a balance.

    I have only recently started looking at this blog and only recently started being a bit more active in my collecting as I have a specific target in mind but if I don’t reach my target or can’t get any reward seats for the flights I want I can at least use the miles to offset some payments on other flights in the future.

    • Rob says:
      26 Oct26 October 10:14

      Agreed, especially if you live in the regions. However, if you are only getting 0.5p per Avios then you should think very carefully before using a BA Amex or converting Tesco vouchers, for example, because you are almost certainly getting a bad deal.

      If your Avios come via work flying then any value you get is a bonus.

  • Philip says:
    26 Oct26 October 18:07

    Thanks to the heads up on here I checked my recent flybe flights and none have credited. This is despite it working fine since linking my accounts last year, 1 is 3 weeks beyond the 30 days but 1 is 3 days beyond. In the first case I got a too late notice but the other I got a ‘wait 30 days notice’ but its 33 days now so rang customer service and asked why they never credit and why I cannot add them myself. I was told to e-mail tech support and include the now expired one if I tried to add it in time but couldn’t. I’ll see what response I get,

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