When the Avios scheme was launched in late 2011, avios.com brought in a range of new airline partners alongside BA, Iberia and American Airlines.
As per this page, it is a little known fact that you can redeem Avios on Air Malta, Flybe, Aurigny and Monarch.
The first thing to note is that these redemptions are with avios.com, not British Airways Executive Club. You need to open an avios.com account and use the ‘Combine My Avios’ function to move Avios from BAEC into avios.com. There is no charge to move your Avios and you can reverse the transaction if required.
Aurigny is a small airline based in the Channel Islands.
They fly to various Channel Islands destinations from Gatwick, Bristol, Southampton, East Midlands, Stansted and Manchester. You can see a full list of routes by visiting their website and clicking on ‘Timetable’.
On September 8th, Aurigny is launching a twice-daily service from London City Airport to Guernsey. The timings are good for a short break with outbound flights from City at 9.15am or an after-work 6.45pm.
The service will initially be run using a specially leased Fokker 50 aircraft whilst Aurigny sources an additional permanent aircraft for its fleet.
At the moment I cannot see any Avios redemption availability on this route. It is still early days, though, with services not due to start for another month and the service having only just gone on sale. It is one to keep an eye on. Given that British Airways does not fly to Guernsey it would be a valuable addition to the Gatwick and Southampton Aurigny services.
(EDIT: A comment below says that Aurigny is now only allowing Avios redemptions on flights under £70. If correct, it is unlikely that redemption seats will appear for the London City route.)
Further details on the new service can be found here.
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to see our latest articles on earning and spending your points and click here to see our list of current Avios promotions.)
About Head for Points
Anyone considering this should consider cash from LCY and points from GCI. MAN-GCI is about £32 and 4.5k GCI-MAN £3 + 4.5k. Depends how you value your Avios, but worth checking.
The difference is down to the taxes charged.
Even better, join aurigny’s loyalty program and mix and match.
They have a pretty good search facility to choose the lowest fares.
We have family in Guernsey and do LGW-GCI-LGW on GR several times a year. As stated above unless there are £39 sale fares it’s almost always worth a making a o/w redemption on the GCI-LGW route (taxes apprx £3 as mentioned). Whereas LGW-GCI taxes apprx £28 so always worth looking at cash fares as often can be found under £70.
The loyalty scheme is useful if you make a lot of trips (you can earn the points from other travellers on the same booking) but points had quite a short validity ( 24 months from memory but correct me if I’m wrong) and were automatically removed regardless of any activity in the interim so at 120 points per sector it needed 14 flight sectors in 2 years to trigger a Ow reward flight (@1600 points). Taxes still payable on top obviously so again better value redemption ex GCI rather than ex UK.
Sorry to be the barer of bad news, but since sometime earlier this year aurigny do not offer avios redemptions on flights over £70 each way. As the minimum pricing is £89, the only way to get the flight with points is with their (very) generous loyalty program. Still I would love to be proven wrong.
Is that true? Very interesting. I will try to get this confirmed by Avios.
Doing a quick search…I’ve found Avios availability for random dates in January ie MAN-GCI-MAN 9/10 Jan for 9000 avios & £33.74
Slightly off-topic however has anyone else had consistent problems using ‘Combine My Avios’ function on BA.com? It keeps showing me as still logged-in but I can’t log out.
Using the Avios site on a Chromebook for some reason means it defaults to a mobile version of the site which doesn’t allow that functionality.
Not sure if Chrome can do this but some browsers allow you to override the setting which tells the website what your machine and browser are. I do this with the icab browser on my iPad – if a site defaults to a mobile site on iPad, icab pretends to be a desktop running IE and it works fine.
I hit a sweet spot redeeming on Aurigny in 2011 just before Airmiles turned into Avios. 1800 Airmiles for 2 of us for tickets that were priced at £260 each for cash. With NO taxes or fees!
That was the equivalent of getting nearly 3p per Avios. A record for me.
Anybody know if you can use Aurigny / Avios through to Dinan /Dinard. In Brittany ?
Need to play around with avios.com and try a few sample dates I guess. Based on earlier comment, if cash fare is usually under £70 each way it may be possible.