Double Avios when booking a package holiday or cruise via avios.com

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 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.

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (February 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.)