Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get 100 free Avios from Wanda travel insurance

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Wanda is a new travel insurance brand launched by Avios. The USP is that it will refund your Avios if you need to cancel your trip, which is something people believe can be a struggle with standard travel insurers.

You will receive 100 Avios for signing up to Wanda’s email newsletter.

There are also bonuses for taking out a policy.

Wanda by Avios travel insurance

Before we get to the free 100 Avios, let’s look briefly at Wanda.

(I do think it’s quite cool that they use the wanda.world URL for their website, but perhaps that’s just me.)

Because we aren’t licensed to advise on insurance, there is a limit to what we can say about Wanda. However, you need to remember that an Avios flight can be cancelled up to 24 hours before departure for a full refund, less BA’s £35 per person cancellation fee.

This means that when it comes to ‘insuring your Avios in case of cancellation’, there isn’t actually much risk to insure!

Your Avios are only at risk and in need of insurance if you cancel in the small window between 24 hours before departure and the time your flight takes off.

The number of Avios covered by Wando is also capped:

  • 75,000 Avios on a Basic policy
  • 250,000 Avios on a Standard policy
  • 500,000 Avios on a Premier policy

Wanda also covers you when you use Avios to pay for car rental, hotels or experiences with points. There may be some value here in a Wanda policy, but:

  • HfP readers shouldn’t really be using their Avios at a poor rate to book car rental, hotels or experiences and
  • I suspect most insurers would reimburse you based on the standard cash rate for a hotel or car hire even if you did use Avios

Earn Avios when you buy a Wanda policy

For single trip cover, you earn Avios at a generous rate of 20 Avios per £1 spent.

However, there’s a snag. You are capped at 1,000 Avios per policy, which is £50 of spending. It won’t be hard for a family looking for decent cover to exceed this.

For a multi-trip policy, you will receive a fixed bonus of 3,000 Avios.

It is obviously worth getting a quote from Wanda if you are looking for travel insurance, but don’t be won over by:

  • earning Avios back – because you are capped at 1,000 Avios on a single trip policy and
  • claims that only Wanda can protect your Avios, because in most cases you would be able to cancel your flight before departure regardless for a full Avios refund and, in the worse case scenario, another insurer may well cover you for the cash value of Avios used

If you have (successfully or not) claimed on your travel insurance for a product bought with Avios, please let us know in the comments.

Claim your 100 free Avios

Back to the headline of the article ….

Wanda is offering 100 Avios to everyone who signs up to its email list.

The offer is capped at 5,000 people and has been running since 15th May, so I don’t know how many of the 5,000 slots are left.

If you visit wanda.world and wait for 30 seconds or so, ou should get a box like this appearing:

Wanda travel insurance Avios

Alternatively, just go here and enter your British Airways Club number. The Avios will post pretty much instantly.

BA accounts registered outside the UK or to people under 18 will not receive the Avios, according to the rules.

I am assuming that the offer will be removed when the 5,000 participants target is hit, but do be aware that HfP readers may send them past this figure today before they can take it down. If you don’t get your 100 Avios, don’t complain!

Comments (73)

  • AET says:

    Worked just now (10:10 am)

  • Ian says:

    On the question of whether you really need to insure against loss of Avios, what about Qatar redemptions? Am I right in thinking that a non-flexible redemption means that you can’t cancel without losing all the Avios used for the redemption?

  • Jon says:

    Had a quick read through the policy wording just now. Couple of things to note:

    – Business trips explicitly not covered
    – Only Avios credited to and redeemed from a BAC account are covered. So any redemptions via QR, AY etc, no good. And ditto any other FFP currencies.

    As an aside, one thing I’ve been looking for and noticed that insurers seem to be getting more restrictive about is cover for a situation where you have, let’s say, pre-booked non-refundable accommodation and/or transfers etc, and the airline cancels or reschedules your flight (well in advance) and rebooks you, say, next day so you lose your first night’s accommodation (or even the whole stay depending on how the hotel treats a no-show) etc. Let’s assume they can’t or won’t re-route you so you can arrive on-time. Not an uncommon situation? I admit I haven’t gone through every policy out there exhaustively, but from the ones I’ve looked at, this seems to be a situation where you’d likely be on your own and have to (try to) claim your losses back from the airline. The obvious solution of course is to never make non-refundable bookings, but you’d then miss out on a lot of sales, and even flexible bookings can become non-cancellable at a certain point. Strikes me as the sort of thing you’d assume your insurance would cover but may well discover it doesn’t. Anyone know of any good policies that *do* cover this sort of situation? 😉

    • JDB says:

      You are right that most policies don’t cover lost hotel nights (and nor does 261) but only necessary extra ones. This isn’t new, but perhaps a popular misconception about insurance cover. It doesn’t only relate to non refundable hotel bookings as a flight delay or cancellation might occur too late for the cancellation deadline. Nice hotels won’t charge!

    • flyforfun says:

      I had this situation a couple of years ago. Lufthansa cancelled my flight to Australia with only a few hours notice at Xmas. Got rebooked 4 days later. I had a hire car booked for around £500 for 3 weeks To rebook for the new dates they now wanted £3000. Luckily I could cancel the booking for no fee and found another provider for about £500.

      When I was talking to the insurer, Staysure, they said if i’d paid in full and it was non-refundable, they would not have refunded me as I had accepted then airlines new terms. If I had cancelled the trip as a result of not going on the original date then they would have refunded me. They said there was an (obscure) option in their policy that I could have selected that would have covered me. I didn’t see it there last time I booked with them.

      This type of event includes hotel, hire car and any entertainment you may have prebooked like theatre tickets that are non-refundable. If you cut your trip short once you start, then you’re fine, it’s just if you start late because of circumstances outside your control that you will be liable for if your insurance doesn’t cover it.

  • GRkennedy says:

    Worked just now (10.35 am)
    The requirement of being registered in the UK doesn’t seem to be enforced.
    I got the pop-up only on a desktop browser, not on mobile.

  • SammyJ says:

    The over 18 restriction doesn’t seem to be enforced either. Successfully completed for all of our HHAs

    You need to open the website, click on a link (the multi-trip tab works), scroll down the page a bit, then scroll back up, and it pops up.

    Needs name, email and then club number on the next screen. Points credited instantly. Thanks!

  • Bloomy says:

    Worked for me the second attempt! as you need to disable your ad blocker guys…. 😎

  • Paul Harris says:

    Wanda won’t let me sign up.

  • Mikeact says:

    Forget their travel insurance if 80+, not available.

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