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Big news – ‘small print’ of the Avios sale bargains revealed, including the £1 RFS destinations

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The avios.com and ba.com January sales are continuing.  Hopefully the upcoming offers will be more exciting than the half-price World Traveller redemptions to the US and Canada we had on Monday.

(This offer is still valid until noon today – 50% off the Avios needed for economy flights to Boston, Chicago, Dubai, Denver, Shanghai, New York, Toronto and Washington.  Full details here.)

I now know the ‘small print’ of four of the remaining five offers.

25% off car hire

Noon Wednesday 8 January to noon Friday 10 January

This deal will go live today at noon at avios.com and ba.com.  You must book with Avis – paying with Avios points – for any destination.  It is valid for bookings up to 30th September.  I discuss this further below.

50% off hotel bookings

Noon Friday 10 January to noon Monday 13 January

This offer is actually slightly better than I expected.  It is valid for hotels in Vienna, Dubrovnik, Prague, Copenhagen, Berlin, Budapest, Istanbul and Algarve, for bookings up to 30th September. There is a special booking website you need to use, but the selection of properties seems decent.

Here is the key thing.  You normally get 0.57p per Avios when using your points for a hotel redemption as I showed here.  Via this deal, you will getting 1.14p per Avios.  That is a very decent offer.

Reward Flight Saver tickets reduced to £1

Noon Monday 13 January to noon Wednesday 15 January

This deal is not the ‘free for all’ we were hoping to see.  It is restricted to the following routes only: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Dublin, Jersey, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Nice.

That said, being able to book a flight to these places for just £1 instead of the usual £35 is certainly a good saving.

You will need to fly between 31 January and 31 May.  Economy only.

50% off hotel bookings

Noon Wednesday 15 January to noon Friday 17 January

The same offer as before, but with a different set of cities – London, Venice, Edinburgh, Guernsey, Florence and Milan. There are 103 hotels available across the 6 cities, to give you an idea of the scale.

Again, you can book a stay at any hotel on the special website for stays up to 30th September.

40% off Eurostar

Noon Friday 17 January to noon Monday 20 January

This offer will only run on avios.com.  I do not have the ‘small print’ for this one!  As ba.com does not offer Eurostar redemptions, their sale will simply finish three days earlier.

Today’s new offer

The offer to be launched today offers 25% off the cost of an Avis car rental when you pay with Avios.  This will be live from noon.

You can book for any destination, with the only proviso being that you pick up the car before 30th September 2014.

This may be an OK deal.  As car hire prices vary so wildly, it is difficult to make a broad judgement.  With just a 25% discount, I doubt that you will be able to get more than 1p per Avios of value compared to a pre-paid cash booking however.

If you are interested, you should price up the car on BOTH ba.com and avios.com.  For odd reasons, it has been shown in the past that the sites often throw up different prices for the same set of dates.

The ba.com link to book an Avis car is 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.

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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

Avis and Avis Preferred, British Airways and Avios

Comments (100)

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

  • John says:
    8 Jan8 January 08:06

    Surely you should also look into other car companies rather than restricting yourself to Avis. I don’t recall many posts on H4P about car hire loyalty programs. Though I recently got burned by Hertz giving me Hertz points instead of airline miles despite telling them not to over 4 times.

    • Ray says:
      8 Jan8 January 08:11

      Also no one way hires,when booking with Avios.

    • Rob says:
      8 Jan8 January 08:17

      Ironically, last night, Hertz credited me with 250 Hertz points instead of 1,000 Virgin miles for a rental last weekend. This is despite not even having my Hertz details in the booking – they must have manually linked the email.

      • John says:
        8 Jan8 January 09:47

        Are you going to try and get this fixed? I’m not sure I can be bothered but if there is an easy way I’ll do it (e.g. an email that gets answered quickly and with no going back and forth)

        • Rob says:
          8 Jan8 January 09:54

          I intend to try today, I have the receipt for the rental on my desk here!

          • Susan says:
            9 Jan9 January 01:17

            Raffles I had a similar issue with Hertz. The problem lay within my Hertz No1 Gold account profile. You need to make sure that you haven’t ticked the box to receive Hertz points. It overrides any frequent flyer number. I failed in getting them switched over, hopefully you will have more luck.

          • Rob says:
            9 Jan9 January 08:15

            But my Hertz number was not added to my booking! I don’t see how they could argue that I wanted points!

        • Lady London says:
          9 Jan9 January 01:25

          I have always found Hertz Gold membership desk to be exceptional in fixing any problems just with a phone call.

          It’s a major reason I stay with Hertz.

  • Worzel says:
    8 Jan8 January 08:14

    “Unmissable” !

    I’m Underwhelmed-Unsurprisingly!

    Thank you though Raffles(and Paul) for the insight.

    Hopefully someone, somewhere, having played the game, then jumped through the hoops, will get something worthwhile.

    • Lipton says:
      8 Jan8 January 08:34

      Same pick up and drop off location with Avis/BA. No good for me. Same with avios.com ?

    • xcalx says:
      8 Jan8 January 09:04

      I will hopefully benefit (plenty of seats on all flights the day iI require) from the RSF £1 deal as I need a couple of LBA-LHR-MAD flights for early April. These are to link up with MAD-MIA business flights booked with Iberia in their real sale.

      I can’t moan though, this last week has been kind to me

      • susan says:
        8 Jan8 January 10:08

        Everyone deserves a few kind weeks, hope this is the first of many for you

  • Bobby says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:00

    “You will need to fly between 31 January and 31 May”

    Would that be take the outbound or complete the return?

    • squills says:
      8 Jan8 January 09:02

      Normally means take the outbound, needs checking of course.

      • Andrew says:
        8 Jan8 January 11:28

        That would potentially mean you could do the (free) UK leg of a RFS and then have a few months layover in London and then book the outward leg to wherever…

        • squills says:
          8 Jan8 January 11:39

          We’ll have to wait & see but I grabbed this typical rule from the latest sale, which would indicate it’s normally the outbound leg that matters:

          ‘5.Selected travel periods apply

          a. Travel in World Traveller and World Traveller Plus to Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa, Colombo (Sri Lanka), Mauritius, Male (Maldives) and the Caribbean from London Gatwick, is available for selected outbound travel dates between 01 January 2014 and 12 December 2014.

          b. Travel in World Traveller and World Traveller Plus to all other long haul destinations from London Heathrow is available for selected outbound travel dates between 25 December 2013 and 30 September 2014.’

    • Rob says:
      8 Jan8 January 09:53

      Not sure to be honest, need to wait for the full list of rules.

  • Rich says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:04

    Would have been nicer if some Paris hotels were included!

  • Jonny says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:19

    Hi Raffles, do you know if the RFS reduction also applies to business class? I would assume not given the nature of the sale?

    bit disappointing the sale isn’t more widespread but can’t really complain too much – with a bit of flexibility some of these offers are genuinely decent IMHO.

  • jfduncan says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:24

    Slightly gutted i was about to book some RFS flights last night to Geneva, but decided to hold out to next week avois sale. Might as well book these flights now…. whilst the seats are still available!

    Might wait for car hire though…

  • Kathy says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:36

    It’s a shame they couldn’t have made the RFS and the 50% off hotels cities match – that would have tempted me to book a nice little weekend away, since it would have meant hardly any cash outlay, and I’d be sure I’d be getting a good deal. Being able to only do either/or makes me much less tempted to jump!

  • Simon says:
    8 Jan8 January 09:52

    Some of these routes have extremely high availability because of the frequencies, ie Amsterdam and Nice.

    It’d be interesting to compare the availability the day before the offer and then once the offer starts.

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