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.


HFP-Barclaycard-Avios-Card

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (May 2023)

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:

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 30th May, the sign-up bonus on the Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard is doubled to a crazy 50,000 Avios! Apply here.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 30th May, the sign-up bonus on the free Barclaycard Avios Mastercard is doubled to 10,000 Avios. Apply here.

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

CRAZY 50,000 Avios for signing up (to 30th May) and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

10,000 Avios for signing up (only to 30th May) 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 £12,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 13th June, the sign-up bonus on The Platinum Card is doubled to 60,000 Membership Rewards points – and you get £200 to spend at Amex Travel too! Apply here.

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

60,000 points AND a £200 Amex Travel voucher until 13th June! 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.

Capital On Tap Business Rewards Visa

Get a 10,000 points bonus plus an extra 500 points for our readers 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 bonus and a £200 Amex Travel credit every year 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.

Comments (492)

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

  • FatherOfFour says:

    I’m trying to find a way to make this work for us… but with no air travel planned until Spring ’24. (Except 2 x 241’s booked for the next 6 months) I’m going to have to watch from the sidelines and steadily grow my Avios stack for another deal another day.
    That is unless I can use them to pay down my BAH (Hotels only) balance which was booked last December for this Nov. I get the gist it can’t be done, or it “might” be able to be done, but don’t want to risk so much in case it can’t!

    • Mike says:

      It can be done. Call or use live chat.

    • Guernsey Globetrotter says:

      Well that’s one perspective but in my mind BA are give out nearly free money here – the only caveat is that it has to be used somehow in the next 2 years. In a 0% savings rate environment, I’m willing to put a few quid in to get a potential 100% return … I mean you can literally buy the Avios off them for around 1p each and get 2p back!

  • GoodExperience says:

    Ok, I’m done with my last few hours work. Cost me £380 and 80k Avios for vouchers totalling £1980.00. Happy with that, thanks Rob.

  • Zara says:

    I’m struggling to find any optimum flights unfortunately. Prob not cottoned on thoigh. Does anyone have any flights they can suggest pls? I’ve tried agp and dub but how do I find the optimal prices? TIA

    • Laura says:

      Jersey to London, one way in premium economy in September worked for me

      • Laura says:

        Sorry, not premium economy, just economy. But had to find an expensive fare to trigger the offer

        • Zara says:

          Thank you. And do you just add random names for the other passengers?

          • FFoxSake says:

            Yes. Works fine. In fact safer that’s more secure than using any of your saved names with Exec Club accounts, unless you want them all to get a copy of the eVoucher email when issued!

    • ABCF says:

      Look at one way flights from Jersey to London costing £58 or £60. Plenty of them in September and October.

  • Cabal of rabid baboons says:

    Jersey to Heathrow one way is a sweet spot.

  • Rich says:

    Do the evouchers have to be used my Sept 23 for bookings or must the flight have been flown by then? so could I book a flight in Sept 23 that is up to Sept 24? Sorry if I have missed that?

    • FFoxSake says:

      All flights need to be completed by 30 Sep 2023 (assuming they don’t extend the voucher end dates again)

  • C says:

    Hitting 45 min with no sign of the voucher. Getting worried that l somehow be stuck when the music stops….

    • Alex says:

      I did 4 between 9-9:30pm today and all arrived within 5mins.

      Although I don’t think you need to apply for the voucher today, you just need to have booked the flights

  • Lady London says:

    Er… being a bit dim… which link do I use in the confirmation email to ensure I get an evoucher and not an FTV? The obvious one seems to lead me to MMB which people are saying don’t use? Is this safe to use if I started from the conf email?

    • YC says:

      MMB worked fine for me. It does say evoucher on the page with the form so I felt comfortable

      • Lady London says:

        Thank you YC I will try this

      • Lady London says:

        evoucher arrived in 5mins many thanks again YC !

        I haven’t had this much fun since Iberia nearly 3 years ago… shame I had hardly any avios left but the few I had have gone to a good home 🙂

    • Rich says:

      In MMB copy the booking reference. Then scroll down and select the “Cancel Booking” link. It takes you to the evoucher request page where you paste in the booking reference. The text does say you will get an evoucher or FTV but as it’s a cash booking you get an evoucher back.

      • Cabal of rabid baboons says:

        Wait for your e-ticket then in MMB go to cancel booking

      • Lady London says:

        Thank you Rich and Cabal it worked… I appreciate you giving me the confidence to go ahead with it.

  • Rich says:

    Got to be in to win 🙂

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

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