Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get a 2p per Avios discount on British Airways cash flights this weekend

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If you are opted in to British Airways Executive Club marketing emails, you will have received a very interesting offer in your inbox yesterday.

If you book a BA flight for cash by midnight on Monday, you can ‘part pay with Avios’ and receive 2p per Avios in value.

Full details are on ba.com here.

Part pay with Avios offer

The offer is VERY flexible:

  • you can book in any cabin
  • you can book for any travel date
  • you can book one-way or return flights

The one minor snag is that BA CityFlyer is excluded so you can’t book the London City or Southampton departures.

All flights must depart from the UK.

Can you pay for your entire flight with Avios?

No.

Unlike Virgin Atlantic, which lets you ‘part pay with points’ up to the entire value of your booking, British Airways only lets you pay the base fare, excluding all taxes and charges.

There are further limits as part of this deal.

For return flights, the only discounts available are (per person)

  • £5 off for 250 Avios
  • £18 off for 900 Avios
  • £32 off for 1,600 Avios
  • £56 off for 2,800 Avios
  • £80 off for 4,000 Avios
  • £100 off for 5,000 Avios

For one-way flights, these numbers are halved:

  • £5 off for 250 Avios
  • £9 off for 450 Avios
  • £16 off for 800 Avios
  • £28 off for 1,400 Avios
  • £40 off for 2,000 Avios
  • £50 off for 2,500 Avios

Each option gives you 2p per Avios, which is exceptionally generous. If you are making a BA booking this weekend, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this offer up to the maximum number of Avios allowed.

No trips planned? You should be able to get a discount on a BA e-voucher

If you have no flights to book this weekend, you should be able to use this deal to get a discount on a British Airways e-voucher.

This is because, when you cancel a flight which uses ‘part pay with Avios’, your e-voucher arrives as 100% cash. You lose your Avios but get a voucher for the full original value of the flight.

Here is an example.

I found a return flight to Athens which was £174. I had to do quite a bit of trial and error to get a price that maximised the cashback.

When I click on ‘Price Breakdown’ in ba.com, I see this:

The base fare is £105 and the taxes and charges are £70. I just managed to get the base fare over the £100 threshold to maximise the discount.

I am shown the full range of discounts because my base fare is over £100:

If I book this flight using the maximum discount, I will pay £74.72 and 5,000 Avios.

I can cancel it under the ‘Book With Confidence’ guarantee. I would (based on BA’s own T&C for ‘part pay with Avios’) receive an e-voucher for £174.72. This would usually arrive within 10 minutes and would be valid against any future cash ticket I book, but can’t be used to pay taxes on an Avios booking.

The exact ba.com wording is:

If you used Avios to pay for part of a booking, can you still apply for an eVoucher?

Yes. You’ll receive an eVoucher that equates to the full value of the original booking, cash and Avios combined, that you can redeem against future bookings. Please bear in mind you won’t receive any Avios related to the original booking as a refund.

The only snag I can think of is that, online, you can only redeem four e-vouchers per booking. You can get around this by ‘merging’ vouchers. If you had eight e-vouchers of £100 which you wanted to use for an £800 flight, you could make two random £400 flight bookings, each using 4 x £100 vouchers. These could be cancelled to get 2 x £400 vouchers and then used for your £800 flight.

Athens is not necessarily the best example because the taxes are relatively high. Looking at our comments, the sweet spot is a one-way from Jersey to London Gatwick. Taxes are around £8 so any fare of £58-ish would let you cash out the maximum £50 for 2,500 Avios.

Please check the comments to this article before acting on it in as readers have added a lot of interesting new data and ideas.

Conclusion

If you had been planning to book any British Airways flights, this offer is a great opportunity to redeem some Avios for a discount at an exceptionally high rate.

If you don’t have any bookings planned, think about whether it is worth ‘buying’ an e-voucher by making a booking and then cancelling it immediately for an e-voucher.

You can find full details on this page of ba.com.

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (491)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • C says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:00

    This is a great offer however BA have increased the prices of most Club Europe flights by about 10-20%. If you look on speedbird online they are still showing the lower prices (I think it gets refreshed every 24 hours). Still a great deal though as you earn some of the avios back from the flight

  • Simon Barlow says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:10

    But if the cash price is high for a european flight, then it would still be better to pay the lot in avios at the fixed avios redemption rate for short haul avios flights?

    • BJ says:
      21 Aug21 August 06:45

      Need to do the maths on a flight by flight basis.

    • John says:
      21 Aug21 August 07:59

      The idea is to book a flight you don’t actually want to take in order to sell as many avios to BA at 2p as possible.

  • Andrew says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:15

    Barcelona seems to be a good one to maximise the discount – managed to beat Rob’s example and pay £62 and 5000.

    • Anuj says:
      21 Aug21 August 06:43

      What date did you book?

    • BJ says:
      21 Aug21 August 06:48

      0roblem with most of Europe is we can go to most destinations from anywhere exUK at generally low cash prices using LCC. So value in this is evoucher for good BA sale in future.

  • Andrew says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:17

    And you can redeem more than one eVoucher as per the FAQs:

    Can you apply multiple eVouchers to a booking?

    Yes, you can apply up to four eVouchers per booking

    • Rob says:
      21 Aug21 August 07:13

      Not online though AFAIK

      • BJ says:
        21 Aug21 August 07:38

        Same with BA Holidays, I don’t think we can use them there online at all but can probably do so over the phone.

        • Joseph says:
          21 Aug21 August 11:11

          We just used 6 e vouchers (2 persons travelling together each time on 3 separate bookings) so technically only 3. Over the telephone to pay a chunk off our BA holiday. Not available online we had to call but didn’t take long to get through.

  • Yuff says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:20

    Is this worth doing on the 160tp routes?

    • Rob says:
      21 Aug21 August 07:12

      Worth doing anywhere ….

      If you want a TP run then Sofia is around £200 in 2022, reduced to around £100 cash.

      • Alan says:
        21 Aug21 August 15:49

        Hi Rob

        What dates were you looking at, I am trying to book a Sofia run but cannot get it under £280.

        • Rob says:
          21 Aug21 August 16:03

          I just looked at BA’s Low Fare Finder – didn’t try to find exact dates but assumed it wasn’t total fiction 🙂

  • Mr. AC says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:44

    Cheers Rob! Booked 3 round-trip flights next year for the family, saved £900 by paying 45000 Avios. Smashing value… My stash will run out at this rate.

  • Robert says:
    21 Aug21 August 06:56

    My maths was completely backwards on this in the chat thread yesterday (hangs head)

  • BJ says:
    21 Aug21 August 07:06

    A good weekend to part pay WTP with avios exINV then subsequently UUA to benefit from both low cost and low net avios. However, I am curious what happens if we want or need to cancel one of those, does it still go evoucher route or does it fo FTV due to UUA? Regardless, it renders the WTP UUA option more attractive than usual since TWC effectively make the change fees of the cash WTP flight redundant. (good monrning @Jill in K’town’, you booking?)

    • Rob Collins says:
      21 Aug21 August 09:05

      You do realise that half the people reading your post don’t know what the hell you’re on about?

      • Doug M says:
        21 Aug21 August 09:55

        Then half do and on that basis it’s a good post.

      • BJ says:
        21 Aug21 August 10:49

        Sorry for confusing you, I was trying to keep the post short by using abbreviations most regular readers are very familiar with (Sukes sets them out below). INV is the airport code for Inverness and many readers are aware that interest in it relates to the fact we do not need to pay air passenger duty when starting flights from there so this can lead to substantial savings. The rest was just a greeting to a long term contributor to HfP who lives near Inverness and many regular readers know here.

    • Sukes says:
      21 Aug21 August 09:21

      I would like more info on WTP + UUA under BWC too as there’s little info on BA.com. FT chat states this results in FTV, not eVoucher, & so you cannot use it online.
      WTP world traveller plus
      UUA upgrade using Avios
      BWC book with confidence
      FT flyertalk
      FTV future travel voucher

      • BJ says:
        21 Aug21 August 10:38

        See reply to Chris as auras below. I would lije to know the answer to the mechanism of refund in this case too.

    • Chrisasaurus says:
      21 Aug21 August 09:47

      I mostly follow except the change fees part?

      • BJ says:
        21 Aug21 August 10:36

        The fees to change any cash flight subsequently upgraded using avios are determined by the rules of the cash flight originally purchased plus any difference in fare. Most CSA will correctly also apply the £35 fee that relates to changing avios bookings but I’ve had one let it go. Because of the travel with confidence and future travel voucher implications at the moment, these have effectively become almost fully flexible tickets since the usual fees can be avoided. What I am uncertain about myself is how a booking that combines part pay with avios with upgrade using avios would be refunded, i.e. evoucher or future travel voucher..

        • Chrisasaurus says:
          21 Aug21 August 11:18

          Understood, hadn’t thought about voluntary changes – makes sense though, comments suggest FTV but that is still useful as long as it’s just a (legit) change to dates etc

          • BJ says:
            21 Aug21 August 13:13

            I ended up voluntarily changing all three UUA bookings I ever made so always uppermost in my mind. With avios availability being very good I am tempted to go this route exINV to the USA next summer now thwt I can use this part pay too. Big decision yo make in the next 48h. I think FTV is most likely too as it is difficult to see it being part evoucher part avios refund.

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