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.

  • Wollhouse says:
    21 Aug21 August 08:50

    Thanks for the heads up… now, the biggest issue is going to be getting hold of an actual person to cancel for a voucher!

    • Rob says:
      21 Aug21 August 08:51

      You can cancel online IIRC

      • KP says:
        21 Aug21 August 08:53

        Yes and I got the e-voucher within 5 minutes yesterday

      • Wollhouse says:
        21 Aug21 August 09:00

        Oh, that makes it easier! Their t&c’s seemed to say you had to ring….
        IMPORTANT: Please do not amend your booking in Manage My Booking yourself, we will do this on your behalf” under the flight only cancel your booking. So this is great news as, like many others, I feel I could not recite BA hold music by heart! Thanks for saving me time on the phone as well as the cash 🙂

        • Wollhouse says:
          21 Aug21 August 09:00

          Could recite! Ha ha

          • SammyJ says:
            21 Aug21 August 13:17

            Just don’t do it in MMB – do it from the ‘apply for a voucher’ section in the Book With Confidence page

          • Joe says:
            21 Aug21 August 22:27

            Replying to SammyJ – you can do it from MMB. Go to cancel booking, then apply for a voucher. You don’t need to wait until 24 hours either, the whole process from booking to e-voucher can be done in 15 minutes.

  • Tom R says:
    21 Aug21 August 09:08

    So could I make multiple of these bookings and cancel them all for e-vouchers? Worth a morning of 10x bookings for £1000?

    • Rob says:
      21 Aug21 August 10:56

      Depends how many future BA cash bookings you would make and how much money you want to invest, given that you need to put some cash upfront.

  • Mart says:
    21 Aug21 August 09:10

    Any tips on best redemptions in europe for a break this September? Club europe if poss?

  • O says:
    21 Aug21 August 09:24

    Does this offer still apply when using a Lloyd’s upgrade voucher?

  • Ciumpy says:
    21 Aug21 August 09:39

    Can the voucher be used for a booking priced in euros for example ?

  • Donna says:
    21 Aug21 August 09:59

    Do UK domestic business class flights get lounge access? I dont have many Avios left so using what i have left for the optimal discount on EDI-LHR return flights.

  • MrD says:
    21 Aug21 August 10:05

    Would there be any reason to use genuine passenger details for this, thinking a larger booking to keep value in a single voucher would be easier for my admin but not got 8 passenger details. I assume it wouldn’t make any difference as refunding to cash voucher equivalent?

    • Nick says:
      21 Aug21 August 10:53

      You’re not guaranteed an e-voucher, and if it remains at FTV for whatever reason, you’ll be limited to the original passengers. The risk is admittedly very much lower now than it once was, but you’d have zero comeback under T&C if it didn’t work out.

      • BJ says:
        21 Aug21 August 11:37

        Shouldn’t be a FTV on a refunded part pay with avios booking, it should be an evoucher. However, as things stand this morning we have one comment stating they got a FTV and another an evoucher. Further datapoints are needed. I’m sorely tempted to exploit this opportunity but with a t least a amex and a Barclays 241 annually I am not yet sold on selling avios.

    • Dubious says:
      21 Aug21 August 11:40

      Sounds like that’s pushing the boundaries a bit (taking a bit of a risk).

      “Voucher Refund Information” from the BA website which implies it covers both FTV and eVouchers:

      “Does the booking have to be made in your name?

      The voucher allows you to make a future booking in the name of the person on the original ticket. If you had multiple bookings each person will receive their own voucher to use. The voucher is non-transferable.”

  • Jonathan says:
    21 Aug21 August 10:27

    How do we know we’ll be able to claim an e-voucher and not a Future Travel Voucher, the latter can only be used when making telephone bookings which incur a £10 fee, which is unavoidable unless the transaction can’t be completed on BA’s website, such as open jaw bookings, etc.

    BA state on their website that you’ll get one or the other, but there doesn’t appear to be any definite answer, and there’s definitely a difference that I’ve mentioned above

    • Rob says:
      21 Aug21 August 10:49

      All cash-only vouchers now come as eVouchers. Anything involving Avios (ie redemption flights) comes as an FTV. BA also doesn’t want you ringing up if possible.

      The only question I would have is whether a booking for two people comes as an eVoucher and, if so, whether you get one or two.

      • Nick says:
        21 Aug21 August 10:58

        MOST cash flights now come as e-vouchers, but not all, and you have no right under to demand one if you don’t get one. It’s much more unusual now, true, but there are still some circumstances in which they’re not converted.

        If it’s for two pax, you get two vouchers as standard – but there is the option to combine up to four in something called a ‘mega voucher’ – you have to ask specifically for this (I can’t remember whether it was ever enabled online, it might be call centre only).

      • Mike says:
        21 Aug21 August 11:15

        It comes as an evoucher, whether it’s 4 or 8 people on the booking.

        • Mike says:
          21 Aug21 August 11:16

          And it comes as 1 voucher, if you tick that box, which it defaults to anyway.

    • John says:
      21 Aug21 August 16:37

      As FTV bookings can’t be made on BA’s website, no fee can be charged

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

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