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

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• Alan says:

  27 Jun27 June 06:42

  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.

• Roger says:

  27 Jun27 June 08:36

  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?

  • Rob says:

    27 Jun27 June 09:05

    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.

• Yuff says:

  27 Jun27 June 09:16

  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 😉

  • Yuff says:

    27 Jun27 June 09:19

    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 🙂

    • Louise says:

      27 Jun27 June 10:50

      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

      • Yuff says:

        27 Jun27 June 19:28

        Did they change your flight or did they swap the aircraft back?

• xcalx says:

  27 Jun27 June 09:39

  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.

• Liz says:

  27 Jun27 June 09:51

  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.

• Billy says:

  27 Jun27 June 10:01

  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

  • Duncan S says:

    27 Jun27 June 10:07

    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.

    • harry says:

      27 Jun27 June 10:12

      Next time perhaps you live in Ukraine

• Peter Taysum says:

  27 Jun27 June 13:12

  I found Avios were cheaper than the “staff discounted version” of a cruise I was offered… With Avios at the previous rate…

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