Forums › Frequent flyer programs › British Airways Executive Club › Family of three – best way to use companion voucher and Avios
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Hi –
We are a family of 3, me, my wife and 2 yr old son. Planning to go to NYC in off peak. We have 140K avios and 3 companion tickets to use.
The best deal I can find is use one companion and one stand alone avios single ticket. Comes to 320,000 avios and cost of 1K in taxes. So I need by buy 180,00 avios at about £2k (with the current 40% offer) making my total being around 3K and spending 320,00 avios.
I was wondering if anyone knew of anyway to make this work cheaper or better – or any quick cheap avios ( I hear you should avoid buying avios). We want to fly in around a months time, so I think credit card avios bonuses won’t land in time.
Many thanks in advice.
What are cash fares like for the dates you are travelling? We are a family of five and often find it’s worth paying for one cash ticket (as we tend to be short of a companion voucher) – particularly if you are buying avios as an alternative. You will earn some avios back too for next time as well as tier points!
It’s very unlikely that you would get much benefit from buying that number of avios, unless cash prices on your route are stratospheric.
Are your companion vouchers all in one account? If not, and at least one is new-style, you could use 1 as a 241 and another for 50% avios reduction.
Other good options are:
1 adult plus child on the 241 booking, the 2nd adult on a cash fare OR a BA holiday. The latter option has many benefits, e.g. deferred payment and you can book accommodation and car hire for all 3 of you in the same booking.
We’ve been travelling as a family of 3 since our teenager and honed our strategy so that one adult travelled on avios and the other paid cash to earn more avios plus status (I got to Silver this year by doing this).
In whose name are the companion vouchers, and are they the new or old style?
If you have one in each of your names, and one is a new style, you could do 2 separate bookings, one using the companion voucher to add your son, and the separate booking using a new style for 50% avios.
Another option to consider if you have the new style vouchers is to go on Iberia from Madrid, although not sure about availability for 3, and you’d have to factor in time/cost of getting there, but IIRC, its 68k avios plus £220 taxes for a business return MAD-JFK per adult.
Yes, grief, don’t pay £2k for Avios.
The option above – going from Madrid for 68k return off peak – is easily the best option, and you get a day or so in Madrid as well if you want it. Not sure how easy it is to get 3 business class on Iberia though.
@NorthernLass have you ever had issues with having 2 sets of PNRs? E.g. are you normally sat together? Have you ever had a PNR kicked from the flight or downgraded?
Yes, we’ve taken to using Anna’s copyrighted 1 x 241 + 1 x BA Hols method! Not always in same
class, but I’m willing to take the hit and sit alone for a few hours with a stash of films/books/red wine…No major issues, it can be slightly irksome having to do the extra admin but that’s about it. One year our MAN-LHR connection was cancelled at the last minute and the ground crew tried to tell us my OH was being re-routed to GCM the same day while son and I were told to come back 2 days later but we told them we were having none of that and they ended up paying £300 for a taxi to LHR for us!
On 2 occasions our teenager has been the one on the separate PNR because we forced him to slum it in CW while OH and I went in F, we couldn’t do online check him for him as an ostensible unaccompanied minor but they quickly sorted it out at the airport. Oddly one of these was on the return leg from BOS and the other on the outbound from MAN so it clearly doesn’t automatically trip some kind of alert.
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