Update on earning Avios from Amex Currency Exchange

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this piece on Avios dropping their relationship with Travelex and jumping into a metaphorical bed with American Express Currency Exchange.

A reader has been in touch to tell me about his experience with ACE at Heathrow.  As I recommend, he had pre-booked his currency online beforehand to get the best rate.

The two interesting things to note, which I didn’t mention in my original piece, are:

• He was allowed to give his BAA WorldPoints card for swiping, so he double-dipped with both Avios and WorldPoints on the same transaction

• He was told by ACE staff that if he paid with his Amex card he would earn 1 bonus Membership Rewards point per £1 spent.  At the time, our reader thought that this was some special bonus promotion deal Amex was running.  However, now that the transaction has posted, it seems that he has earned the 1 point per £1 because Amex treated the transaction as a purchase, not as a cash advance.

Now, I would want to see some more people try this before making any firm statements.  However, if Amex Currency Exchange at Heathrow is treating paying for pre-booked currency as a purchase and not a cash advance, this opens up a lot of interesting options – including a quick way for people to hit their £2,000 spend target to trigger the Amex Gold and Amex Platinum sign-up bonuses.

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (January 2021)

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

There are two official British Airways American Express cards:

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

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

If you have a small business, we especially recommend Capital On Cap’s Visa card which comes with a generous bonus worth 10,500 Avios:

(Want to earn more Avios?  Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)