How many Avios do I need to fly to ….?

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• rio says:

  29 Aug29 August 13:01

  If you are using a Barclays “upgrade” voucher do you still get the “More pricing options”?

  • Blair Waldorf Salad says:

    29 Aug29 August 13:38

    No. Max Avios min cash option only.

• Alex Sm says:

  29 Aug29 August 14:17

  Interestingly, you removed Moscow but not St Petersburg from the list while it was discontinued five years ago (unrelated to war in Ukraine) and it was covered on HfP 🤓🇷🇺

• David says:

  29 Aug29 August 18:13

  Tlv prices became like athens and thessaloniki since they move to shourthaul aircrafts.
  Therefore at 1 pound and 48,000 points ba move a lot of passengers from ba europ club to the business dreamliner of elal.what a bargin….

• Robert says:

  29 Aug29 August 19:08

  Handy to have this table thanks, easily find the destinations I need.
  In response to earlier posts regarding the average of 1.0p/avios, I got 7.1p/avios for NCL-LHR-JFK return using a 2-4-1 in J, so there are ways to get more value for your Avios.

  • Rob says:

    29 Aug29 August 19:31

    How does that £6,000 implied valuation fit into my earlier analysis? You’re implying you would otherwise have bought a fully flex ticket.

    *If you always buy refundable tickets, it is fair to compare the cost to a refundable flight (say £6,000)

    *If you never buy refundable tickets, it’s only fair to compare the cost to a non-refundable flight (say £2,000)

    *If you would happily fly indirect if you paid cash, it’s only fair to compare the cheapest ticket on the market, not the BA price (say £1,500)

    *If you’d never pay for Business Class in the first place, you should probably compare it to the cost of an Economy flight plus whatever you’d be willing to pay if BA offered you a cash upgrade at check in (say £1,000, based on £600 plus the £200 each way you’d agree to pay to upgrade)

    • Robert says:

      29 Aug29 August 20:54

      Agree with those examples.
      My maths might be off but I calculated it at £7900 plus the £800 for the regional legs (£200 x 2 x 2) = 8700 x 100 minus the 160,000 Avios it cost me then divided by 100 to get the value in pence. If that’s wrong then I’m blaming it on being a long day lol

      • Rob says:

        29 Aug29 August 21:23

        Unless you would have paid £8,700 cash for that ticket you didn’t get 8p per Avios of value for it ….

        I suspect, at best, you might have paid £1,500 cash for a business class flight to NYC in a BA sale. This is probably the valuation you should use.

        It’s an important point because, for example, you may be considering buying Avios from BA at 2p each because in theory you’re quadrupling your money – but you’re not really ….

        • Robert says:

          29 Aug29 August 22:14

          Fair point, I probably wouldn’t pay that much personally, maybe for work when it’s a flexible ticket. Thanks for the insights. I also got that Marriott hotel for half the bonvoy points in NYC during the trip so another good HfP win there thanks.

        • platy says:

          30 Aug30 August 01:59

          “Unless you would have paid £8,700 cash for that ticket you didn’t get 8p per Avios of value for it ….”

          But you do. That’s your problem. You do get the value, but you don’t get the cash in your pocket (unless you accept cash+pay, redemptions for gift cards, etc., as cash).

          You are conflating the two concepts value and “cash saved” (not my term). Objective and subjective definitions.

          You thereby end up with an unceasing stream of very confused thinking on the topic of value.

          You can end up, for example, (by relating supposed point valuations to what you’d have paid) inverting valuations so that the points needed for first class are less valuable than those for economy.

          Hint – stop insisting that points / miles are cash and treating them as such. They’re not. They are simply loyalty tokens linking your loyal spend to some sort of reward for that spend (if redeemed).

          Their capacity to do that is highly variable – if you homogenise that by insisting on a fixed valuation, you’re directing attention away from the real action.

          Now your trip to Lagos above – the problem comes when you encourage redemptions in the ball park of 1p, making it more likely readers will miss a whole cohort of opportunity to extract greater value from their points.

          By all means use them to offset some expense, if you want and can. By all means assign some subjective value, if that’s your gig. But that sort of thinking incurs the risk of greatly undervaluing your points from an objective perspective.

          Basically, it’s a highly subjective and extremely limited view of the loyalty universe. Perhaps your readers want it all dumbed down. Perhaps they don’t. Your blog, your choice (and generally an excellent blog)

  • platy says:

    30 Aug30 August 02:04

    @ Robert

    In my world view 7p / Avios is an excellent result, regardless of what you might or might not have paid for those flights.

    • Occasional Ranter says:

      30 Aug30 August 03:58

      He’s still going 😮

• Meike Hokkenbaals says:

  30 Aug30 August 03:40

  The Avios price fir Amman feels like a con. Especially when the business class is just a narrow-body economy seat with the middle seat blocked. For just an extra 10k, you can go to Abu Dhabi on a proper longhaul aircraft with flat beds an everything!

• Jake says:

  30 Aug30 August 12:47

  In the past I have seen various ‘more cash less avios’ options for Qatar flights but this doesn’t seem to be the case now – has that been removed from partner bookings as a rule or am I just unlucky?

• John says:

  30 Aug30 August 16:18

  So I recently made two redemptions on QR, one in J for 55k avios and one in F for 82.5k avios. Copay was very close to £170 for both.

  As I now value avios at 0.5p, it’s very simple, I paid £445 and £582.50 for those flights. And those figures are roughly what I would like to have paid, in a fantasy world where J/F flights are sold cheaply. I am also satisfied that I paid round about 0.5p to acquire at least that amount of avios (137.5k).

  Just out of interest I looked at the cash prices and they were £5000 and £6500 respectively, but that is completely meaningless. If there was no availability I just wouldn’t be going on that trip at all. There are no alternative flights I would have taken in any cabin.

  Effectively I am just treating those flights like I would a “mistake fare”. It’s like another way to pay. Say an item on amazon is typically £150 but from time to time someone sells it for £100. I don’t consider that I am saving £50 if I buy it when it’s £100. Then suppose John Lewis decides to sell it for £80 and I pay with a JL gift card that I acquired for £75. According to some people’s logic, I would have to say that my valuation of £1 (of amazon credit) is 50p!

  • platy says:

    30 Aug30 August 23:25

    Out of interest, let’s apply your 0.5p valuation to the real-life and available MAD-DFW Avios+cash combination example in my post above and see what happens citing data from several of the payment options.

    You could “pay” 62500 Avios plus GBP128 at ((62,000 x 0.005) +128) = GBP438.

    Or you could “pay” 53,150 Avios plus GBP231 ((53150 x 0.005) + 231) = GBP763

    Or you could “pay” 12500 Avios plus GBP1408 at ((12500 x 0.005) + 727) = GBP853.

    Assuming that you want to minimise your outlay, you’d have to choose the first option and your least preferred would be the third option.

    BUT you would then have chosen the option, which actually delivers the worst actual redemption value for your Avios, given the discount airfare at GBP3133 . You would have accepted redemption value of 4.8p over 19.2p per Avios.

    Your approach inverts the ranking of options from best to worst redemption value for your Avios.

    OH NO – I hear some cry – only rich people pay that airfare! OK, just to keep those attached to their highly subjective world views happy, let’s see what happens when we adjust the cost of the airfare downwards in my spread sheet. In fact, make it half the price at GBP1565.

    Your method once again misidentifies the option providing the best redemption value for your Avios. You would have accepted redemption value of 2.3p over 6.7p.

    Let’s make it one third price at GBP1050. Still a fail. You would have accepted a redemption value of 1.5p over 2.6p.

    To make your method “work” (correctly identify the most redemption value) you need to presume the discounted airfare to be reduced by about 75% (to GBP805).

    Whatever other considerations are in play when making a redemption choice, I would personally prefer to make decisions informed by the objective math.

  • platy says:

    31 Aug31 August 00:04

    “Say an item on amazon is typically £150 but from time to time someone sells it for £100. I don’t consider that I am saving £50 if I buy it when it’s £100. Then suppose John Lewis decides to sell it for £80 and I pay with a JL gift card that I acquired for £75. According to some people’s logic, I would have to say that my valuation of £1 (of amazon credit) is 50p!”

    FWIW nor do I consider that I’ve saved GBP50 when purchasing an item for GBP100 instead of GBP150.

    But what I do have is access to data that can be harvested and then applied to inform my purchasing choices. Using your example, I can divide the discount by the retail cost of the item and convert to a percentage, (50 divided by 150 times 100 = 33%) and thereby come up with an objective number that enables a consistent comparison. If I find a comparable item selling for GBP90 instead of GBP180, I know at 50% that’ a better deal objectively and in relative terms.

    Crucially, anybody can apply the same method and would come up with exactly the same result. How they perceive and apply that information is a matter of personal choice.

    Similarly, I can calculate objectively the redemption value of my miles and points applied to differing redemption options and thereby make an objective comparison to inform my choices. I never consider that I’ve “saved” cash when I redeem my points and miles. Like your example, in many cases, I simply wouldn’t have made the trip.

    My last itinerary included AS miles redemption (BA LIS-LHR-LAX in biz and first), two QF FF points redemptions (QF first LAX-SYD and biz BNE-SIN) and a SQ miles redemption (SQ Suites SIN-LHR). I would never have paid for that! But I can still use objective data to inform my choices of which redemptions to snaffle up and which points / miles to use from my portfolio. Then you can layer on the subjective stuff.

    Since I would never have made that trip, the logic of some would conclude that the value of my points was zero, they were saving me nothing. In fact, it cost me to use them because I had incurred the opportunity cost of travel expenses. I just don’t’ find that sort of logical absurdity at all helpful.

    Unlike some, I never consider my points and miles in cash terms. Firstly, they are not cash and not a fiat currency. They only have financial worth in very few instances (e.g. gift card redemptions and, at a pinch, cash offset redemptions). But I can still make meaningful objective and relative comparisons between options.

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