Avios.com (not British Airways Executive Club) is, technically, a travel agency. You may not be aware that you can use them to book a package holiday and earn yourself bonus Avios points in the process.
Until 7th July, the earning rate is doubled and you will earn 10 Avios points per £1 spent on your booking.
The first thing to note is that these are avios.com promotions, so you will need an avios.com account to collect Avios points. These can be transferred to British Airways Executive Club later if necessary.
The avios.com homepage for package holiday deals is here.
They do not just work with ‘bucket and spade’ operators. The list includes some decent names (this is just a sample of the list):
- Club Med
- Cox & Kings
- Elegant Resorts
- First Choice
- Inghams
- ITC Luxury Travel
- Kuoni
- Mark Warner
- Neilson
- Thomas Cook
- Thomson
- Travelsphere
- Villas4You
The list of Avios cruise partners is here and includes:
- Celebrity Cruises
- Cunard
- Fred Olsen
- P&O
- Princess
- Royal Caribbean
- Silversea
- Viking Cruises
The recommend way to book is to search for whatever you are after directly on the website of the tour operator and then simply call Avios to make the booking.
They accept Amex and there is no surcharge for using any credit card.
Historically, the holidays team appears to have leeway to reduce prices if you can find a comparable deal – and you will still earn your Avios on the bookings
Double Avios points – but less of a deal than you think
Until 7th July, you earn 10 Avios points for every £1 spent on a package holiday. It isn’t clear from the wording if cruises are included or not.
This is being advertised as ‘double Avios’. However, late in 2015, avios.com quietly halved the earning rate on package holiday bookings. 10 Avios per £1 used to be the standard rate – now it is only 5 Avios per £1. This promotion simply brings it back to what it used to be every day.
The other downside is that you don’t receive your Avios points until 28 days after your holiday, so you may be waiting a while for them.
It is worth noting that you can also REDEEM Avios points for a discount on a package holiday – see here for details. I do not recommend this. The discount is just 0.5p per Avios point you redeem which is poor but, to be honest, I could just about live with it if Avios rich. More important is that you will not receive any Avios points for the portion of the booking which you pay in cash. This makes the net outcome substantially worse. Indeed, the ‘double Avios’ promotion is only valid on 100% cash bookings.
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for the latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios from current offers and promotions.)
About Head for Points
I booked on a similar deal back in 2014 for. Cruise with celebrity for our honeymoon and received 10 avios per £1.
They matched the lowest price I found which also included drinks packages and gratuity.
I also only had to pay a deposit in January for a December cruise but locked in the price and the avios.
How about REDEEMING Avios for a 100% holiday booking? Sure, 0.5p per Avios isn’t great, but this could be a useful way of denting the high Avios balances that some of us have which would otherwise take years of flight redemptions (assuming no further ‘enhancements’).
Has anybody done this and how was the experience?
You can get better than 0.5p via Avios hotel bookings though, so the package route is not hugely attractive.
I admit it is an option if youve built up a massive balance via business travel but in that scenario you would be Gold and can book any seat you want for Avios via Gold Priority Rewards.
I was looking at our Dubai hotel in October, on avios last week, and the room was 1.98m avios for the 11 nights against a current cash price of £11.5k, so just under 0.6p per avios.
However some weeks were half that, in terms of avios, so with better planning it would be possible to get over 1p per avios if there aren’t decent cash prices available.
I did get a much better deal, than the current cash price, through Ebookers a couple of months ago 😉
PS – Etihad had moved our flight from the 380, to a 777, 3 weeks ago, but thanks to a Myflights alert it looks like they have moved all of us to the 8am flight as I had pleaded that I specifically booked the flight because of the F apartment. So very happy with Etihad’s CS so far 🙂
They did that to me earlier this year, as we have a long connection time to Male in Sept. Thankfully put us back on the a380
Did they change your flight or did they swap the aircraft back?
I have cashed in some soon to expire (courtesy of 3v) Tesco CC vouchers for 2 Royal Caribbean Transatlantic cruises in 2017 .
My choice was either 81,600 Avios or £1020 off each cruise for £340 worth of Tesco CC vouchers 1.25p per Avios. First time using this option as the cruises are usually cheaper to book with a US travel agent but on occasion booking in the UK was cheaper and included a drinks package.
I have just booked our 28 day Rte 66 car hire for next year via Avios.com using part pay. When I started researching a couple of weeks ago the cost was coming out at around a shockingly high £1500. The online price on Avios.com for a Group E was £1500 – this included a $1000 surcharge for the one way trip from Chicago to LA. If I split the journey into 2 x 14 day hires, the surcharges reduced to 2 x $300 and the cost came down to around £1300 online. I called Avios at the weekend and for the exact same info I was quoted £1181. In the past they have offered me 5% discount so I asked for it again and got it bringing the cash cost down to £1122. As I have already bought my redemption flights for this trip and have enough Avios/Virgin miles for another 3 USA long hauls I decided to use 51000 Avios to reduce the price by a further £280 (0.54) – I know this is not a great deal. I am happy that I have managed to get the original £1500 cost down to £840 – I could have used a lot more Avios to reduce the cost further but decided I could live with spending 51K. It is a handy tool being able to use Avios part pay if you are Avios rich and you want to keep your cash costs down.
Just slightly off topic but does the BA website do the surcharge of £10 when using a BA premium Amex card? Would be quite ironic if they did considering they have their name on it n
My experience is yes. Any booking I’ve made through the BA website has had the Amex surcharge, even for the BA Amex, which just seems insanity to me.
Next time perhaps you live in Ukraine
I found Avios were cheaper than the “staff discounted version” of a cruise I was offered… With Avios at the previous rate…