‘Part Pay With Avios’ is the scheme which allows you to reduce the cost of a British Airways cash ticket by redeeming Avios points.
Launched in 2013, it has been a bit of a damp squib. It is usually restricted to short-haul flights only and the maximum discount is £50 (an improvement on the original £30, admittedly).
Given that you are receiving a pretty poor exchange rate for your points, it is a bit pathetic. Why can’t I redeem my Avios to cover the entire cost of a ticket? I would understand why not if BA was giving me a fantastic deal but 0.67p per point is never going to excite anyone.
British Airways runs occasional promotions where you can also use your Avios for a reduction on a long haul ticket. That offer is now back, and for the first time it has been extended to a maximum £500 saving.
The deal has also been improved to give you a saving of 1p per Avios point. The usual discount is 2/3p.
Here are the rules:
You must book a long-haul flight before July 15th
You must travel by August 31st 2015
Your flight must depart from Heathrow or City, not Gatwick
This time, only Club World and First are included (but, of course, BA is currently having a sale on World Traveller and World Traveller Plus tickets)
For bookings in Club World or First, you can choose between:
£50 off for 5,000 Avios
£100 off for 10,000 Avios
£200 off for 20,000 Avios
£300 off for 30,000 Avios
£400 off for 40,000 Avios
£500 off for 50,000 Avios
It is unfortunate that this cannot be combined with any sale pricing at the moment. However, it is good news that BA is finally making the discount worthwhile at 1p per point and letting you redeem a greater number.
The ‘Part Pay With Avios’ website is here. Full details of this promotion can be found there.
(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
Hopefully, if this is successful, they may extend it. The timescales here are useless for me and with the devaluation, I’m not planning on using BA much going forward, so need a way to burn off my stash of Avios.
Probably the whole deal is useless, I imagine that for vast majority of longhaul destinations the fares will still be £500+ more expensive than the cheapest wortwhile alternative despite throwing away 50k avios. Needs to be balanced against hefty avios earned for top tier members though.
Maybe next BA will allow you to pay for seat selection by using Avios!
Bit radical that ….!
How did the new BA flight to KUL go CV?
I’m in KL now, I’d describe Club World as functional. The food was good (I chose the Asian options), and a choice of 2 champagnes.
Flying non stop meant that for the first time ever on long haul I slept for almost the whole flight. The cabin crew were old contract, so very…solid. I liked that!
I liked the comment from the guy sat in 1a, wondering why his company had spent so much money for him to sleep in a ‘toilet cubicle’!
Overall, a good redemption flight, but I wouldn’t pay cash for it as so many better options.
Sounds fine to me. I paid £904 return from KUL-GLA in WT+ including UUA at old rates so quite happy with that plus avios I’ll earn. Had not thought of it as a flying toilet cubiclenlol but the privacy CW offers a solo traveller is its one remaini g redeeming feature in my opinion. I lime that it is overnight both ways so hopefully will sleep much of it like you. I wish BKK could revert to overnight flights. Just got informed the LHR to EDI 18:40ish flight been cancelled again this winter so face with 4hr connection from BKK. I think I’ll call them and push for a rebooking on QR at no extra charge or cancelattion with 30k extra miles to compensate for devaluation.
Clearly people are buying the tickets or BA would be selling them for less, so I’m not sure that view holds up!
What IS possibly true is that the fares, outside of a sale, don’t work for the leisure market.
There is an interesting development here in that your employer may turn around and say that you need to declare all of the miles you have earned on business trips and that those miles will now be used to reduce the cost of future business trips via this route.
Unlikely due to the major admin headache involved.
Does part pay with Avios exist for corporate rate tickets?
Only the biggest companies have discount deals with BA. My wife’s bank pays regular rates and uses Portman Travel. It wouldn’t be a massive strain to switch those bookings to ba.com via a PA.
Yes, people are buying the tickets for two main reasons. Firstly, the majority of the UK market, in both directions, is in London and south east so the attraction is direct flights to just about anywhere. For ne that is understandable, I too would pay a premium for a direct flight but probably no longer what BA is asking. The second is high value corporate customers. Despite this, I remaun convinced that unless BA does somethingabout its fares, products and services soon then they are sleepwalking into disaster.
There is a reasons Singapore Airlines fills 4 LHR flights a day to Singapore whilst BA only has 2, one of which carries on to Australia. The market catches up with everyone in the end!
What Virgin Atlantic did – basically dropping pretty much everything which flies east and bringing in more flights west (fancy a long weekend in Detroit?) – may well be the right move because those eastern routes are protected from the Middle East and Asian carriers.
I’ve spent all my avios now. Hotels, Eurostar, and whisky from avios.com 😉
Hmm the BA details page is opaque as usual – it’s not clear if bookings with domestic connections are allowable under the offer or not.
I’m hoping one day that BA allows me to pay the taxes and fuel surcharges with Avios.
I’d happily pay an extra 50,000 Avios to have a completely FREE flight in J or F.
You know it’s never going to happen