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Hi all,
I’ve never really signed up to and taken advantage of travel rewards schemes but have often seen friends and family do it. So last year I decided to give it a serious go, and thanks to the HfP site I signed up to the Amex Gold card and I’ve just this month downgraded to the fee-free version when the first year elapsed and I needed to figure out what to do next. I’ve got 111,000 Amex points.
I must admit I’m not sure how to make the most of these points I have and which card to move to next so would really appreciate some guidance.
We’re a family of 5 and the goal really is to save money for holidays, be that for flights or accommodation although I lean towards flights, being the costlier of the two. We typically go on 2 holidays a year.
I’ve read a number of the posts and reviews on the site and it seems to me by best two options are the British Airways American Express Premium Plus or the Amex Gold.
Is my assessment right? Can anyone help me understand why one of these would be better suited than the other? Should I be considering any other cards?
And how do I put my existing points to use?
Many thanks in advance.
Really depends what you want to do. You don’t say what type of holidays you go on, short vs long haul, destimations, what cabins you are aiming for, etc.
If you want to fly in the posh(er) bit of the plane then, for a family group, the BAPP is very useful as you get one voucher per year and they last for two years. Collect two 2-for-1s over the next year and a bit and you can now fly 4 people for the Avios price of two.
Check out the Avios Redemption University series for huge amounts of information on using Avios for flights.
Start here: https://www.headforpoints.com/2020/04/06/how-do-you-book-flights-using-avios-points/
If you are very limited in flexibility and want to save hard cash rather than upgrade to flying in premium cabins (assuming you don’t already) – as taxes+charges cash costs will still be just under £1k/person on long haul on premium cabin flights – then converting to hotel points is likely to be more useful. These are simpler to understand in nature (you use points to pay rather than cash so the hotel is genuinely £0 cash cost; you’re making a direct cash saving) and they are far less restricted in terms of availability on dates you’re able to travel (I’m guessing school holidays are a factor). Hilton isn’t the best conversion rate from Amex (you lose a little value when you swap out Amex points into Hilton points), but they do do guaranteed interconnecting rooms which are extremely useful for larger families – meaning you could fit your family of 5 into two base rooms using the standard points redemption rate.
Again, the introductory articles about each hotel scheme on this site are the best place to start [ see the “is XXX the best hotel scheme under the hotel offers tab at the top for a good summary of each scheme].
Once you clearly understand your target end result then the best credit card(s) to use to get to that outcome should become a lot clearer.
I’m no expert, but I think if you have recently closed an Amex Gold card you wouldn’t be eligible for another Sub on it. So provided you meet the eligibility criteria you would be better of with a BAPP card and work towards a 2 4 1 voucher, but you need to be able to pue 15K per annum through the card to get this.
The other option might be the barclay’s avios mastercard, but I think to get this you can’t already hold any other Barclaycards. There is a sub and you get 1.5 avios on your spend, and another kind of voucher but I forget what it’s called. The info is all on here though.
As said above you really need to decide what kind of holidays you want i.e. short haul economy or club, long haul economy or club. The general consensus from here is that long haul club gives the best value. But I have been using my avios to travel on longish (3 to 4 hours) short haul flights in Club, which suits us as it feels better than being at the back of the aircraft for this length of time, and gets us into the lounge.
Maybe if you tell folks what type of travelling you want to do and where to, they may come up with more suggestions.
Apologies for missing some key info. We typically fly short-medium haul flights i.e. Turkey, Egypt, Portugal or Middle East (UAE, Qatar). That will probably continue in the main. As the kids get older (10, 7 and 3 right now) I can see us going longer haul to Malaysia, Singapore etc.
In terms of cabin, it’s always Economy and I think for the short-medium haul flights I’m good with that in return for making savings. Maybe on a longer haul flight to the far east in future or for one of our trips to Middle East, it would be nice to go in upgraded cabin.
Travel dates will always have to be during school holidays so yes, restricted to those windows.
And in terms of spending, I got my wife a companion Amex Gold card when we had that and in total we put over £25k on that in 12 months.
Hopefully that helps?
If you are a family of five you probably just need to collect as many avios as you can and then book 2 or 3 of you onto reward flights, then maybe pay for the other 2 or 3 cash. The only problem I can see with that is you might end up on different PNR’s, but I am not sure how big a problem this is in reality, as you and one child could go on the paid for tickets and your wife and other two children can go on the reward tickets.
You probably need to go onto the BAEC site and do some dummy bookings and see what suits you and your family and then work towards that. Although 111,000 Amex points sounds a lot in reality you may need double that to get any real benefits on flights. If you wish to travel in school holidays you need to be looking at booking earlier rather than last minute.
It might be worth you wife applying for an amex gold in her own right, if she meets the signing up criteria, as this is 20,000 (?) easyish points. Also balance boost is worth investigating on the BAEC site, you can boost most things that have come through in the last 30 days on your account at set costs.
Unfortunately I don’t know anything about hotel points so you should probably investigate these further before you change your amex points into avios, as once they have gone over to BAEC there is no going back on them.
Thank you for the insightful response. Point taken re ending up on different PNRs – I didn’t think of that but can see the risk.
I like the idea of dummy bookings but apologies, how exactly do I do that? Booking earlier rather than last minute is ok with me as that’s what I do normally anyway.
If we’d need close to 250,000 avios to get any real savings that’s where I’d question whether I’m better off trying to get accomodation costs reduced instead of trying to cover flights as i can’t see how we could accrue that many points over the course of a year and ideally I’d like to be able to use our earned points once a year for one of our holidays. Guess the dummy bookings would help understand that better.
With 3 kids, your best use of points would be to use avios to get you to Europe in the school holidays. You can get a return to, say, Nice, for around 10k avios plus £35 each, or slightly more avios to places like Spain and Greece. There are often 6 or more reward seats available in economy, but even if you had to make separate bookings we have done that for years and not had any major issues.
You will need a BAEC account with some activity to be eligible for these flights – start by reading the articles on this site about collecting and spending avios.
So for holidays farther out to the Middle East and Far East, am I better off using points to save on accomodation costs rather than flights? Because if so, Amex would make sense as I can convert to either Avios or Hotel schemes.
I’ve clearly got more reading to do!
You’ll need a lot more points if using avios for long haul flights (in premium cabins, anyway). You probably need to work out how many you can realistically generate per year then look at what they will get you.
Also, which hotel scheme would you use them for – again points pricing can be pretty high, especially at Marriott properties since they went to dynamic pricing.
You also don’t say where you are located. If you’re in the South East and the target is short haul then those Avios redemptions on short haul look pretty attractive and Avios might well be the way to go. If you’re located in, say, Leeds then using BA for shorthaul is a pain in the bum while you have a good Jet2 network right on your doorstep (and it is easier to connect to Amsterdam than London). Hotel points (in capped redemption schemes) may be more useful to you then – particularly for stays in the Middle East on cash-expensive (e.g. half term) weeks. Just goes to show there is no right or wrong answer with this stuff. 🙂
That said, I’m a firm believer that it is not useful getting hung up on “value” and simply maximising the “saving” you got from using points vs what the cash price happened to be. This is effectively having your travel choices decided for you on which locations/journeys are cheap for points yet expensive for cash. I think a useful thought experiment would be: “where would we really like to go on our summer holiday in 2026” even if you end up with two or three options. You can then focus your research on how points can make any of those potential holidays cheaper, nicer, or ideally both, and have plenty of time then to collect the relevant points to make it happen.
We’re based in London. I will get through the Avios university series of articles and then play around with the numbers and bookings to see what answers come out.
For now I’ll continue with the Amex rewards card until I can identify an obvious better alternative.
How old are the children? If you have years ahead of you of having to travel in school holidays, there are loads of ideas on this site about how to mitigate the (outrageous!) costs by using points and taking advantage of deals.
10, 7 and 3 so yea we are school holiday prisoners for several years to come.
Do you mean on the forum because I don’t think I’ve come across any articles on that…
I’ve been through the Avios University series of articles which was really informative and I’ve got a better understanding now of how it all works. To help understand how many Avios points I’d need to go to various destinations I’m trying to use the BA reward flight finder search but it doesn’t work – it keeps saying “Sorry – there seems to be a technical problem”. Am I doing something wrong or is this tool just unreliable in terms of availability?
I’ve had better luck using Qatar Airways’ reward flight finder but that obviously only gives me an idea of how Qatar Airways price their reward flights, not BA.
https://www.headforpoints.com/2023/02/13/how-many-avios-points-do-i-need-to-fly-to/
There’s a handy chart in this article, though of course when you go to book you get a variety of other avios and cash ratios to choose from. Once you’re familiar with which zone attracts which pricing, it’s fairly easy to remember (e.g. NYC each way in CW will be 80k/90k avios plus £175 peak/off peak).
Thanks! So if I take Economy class to Doha during peak time as an example, if it’s 30,000 Avios + £50 one-way, does that mean it would be double the Avios and cash for return?
And if I had enough Avios to cover Economy return flights for 3 people, I could book 3 tickets that way and then buy 2 with cash?
Yes, and that’s all possible. If you’re not using a BA Amex or Barclays voucher, also have a look at economy redemptions on Qatar – it’s about 21k avios plus £60 each way, and far better than BA economy.
However, even at peak periods BA usually has one or two off-peak days each week (usually Tuesday and/or Wednesday), where this route would be 25k avios each way, saving you quite a few for 3 passengers.
Which reminds me, did BA ever release the 2025 peak dates chart?!
Don’t forget that you can earn Avios on far more than credit cards. I get a large proportion of mine through the BA shopping portal on everyday purchases – for example, hotels.com bookings made that way earn 8 Avios per £; Marks and Spencer earn 4/£; and JD Sports gives 9/£. Most household name retailers give you Avios for free if you start your online journey there.
Thanks! I was starting to wonder this actually because I’m conscious I’ve only been able to collect 100,000 Amex points because I received a big bonus for signing up to the Gold card, then a spend bonus after 3 months, then a bunch of points for a referral. Those wouldn’t happen every year (unless I guess I kept switching cards for the sign-up bonuses) so I’ll need to maximise my Avios earnings through tips like yours.
If you’re happy travelling economy, you could apply for the free BA Amex card which gives a small avios SUB plus a companion voucher (though spend requirement is changing, can’t recall if it will be £15k like the BAPP?) This would save you 60k avios on a peak economy redemption.
Yes, and that’s all possible. If you’re not using a BA Amex or Barclays voucher, also have a look at economy redemptions on Qatar – it’s about 21k avios plus £60 each way, and far better than BA economy.
However, even at peak periods BA usually has one or two off-peak days each week (usually Tuesday and/or Wednesday), where this route would be 25k avios each way, saving you quite a few for 3 passengers.
Which reminds me, did BA ever release the 2025 peak dates chart?!
I did do some experimenting on Qatar’s reward flights search but when I compared the cost of purchasing 3 reward flight tickets using Avios + cash and 2 pure cash tickets vs buying all cash tickets (all Economy class, Feb 25 half term dates), I was only saving £200. I know that’s still a saving but it didn’t seem all that if I’m honest. Is this what people and the articles mean when they say the redemptions aren’t great for Economy and it’s only business and first class where you get the best value?
I did check the business class cost but there’s no way I can afford the business class cash tickets I’d need to buy alongside the redemptions.
I know that’s still a saving but it didn’t seem all that if I’m honest.
Most people aim to earn at least 1p per Avios. Long haul economy is the hardest place to find value, although sometimes a redemption flight will be attractive if cash prices are high. If you can earn a credit card voucher from either Barclays or Amex, you’ll get double the value – although you’ll have to factor in the cost of the voucher if your credit card carries a fee.
Longer short haul flights often work well. For example, I’m about to book flights to Athens for next summer. Including baggage, the cash price is £366 in Economy or £689 in Club (well worth the extra in my view). Travelling with a LCC is unlikely to be much cheaper once baggage charges and seat reservation fees are added, and the flight times would be less convenient. The Avios costs with the minimum cash payment of £1 are 30,500 and 55,000 respectively, so the target value of 1p per £ is easily exceeded. With an Amex or Barclaycard voucher, the deal becomes even more attractive.
If i were you, I’d pay cash for economy long haul and use my scarce Avios for short haul or premium long haul seats.
In terms of earning or spening Avios you need a BAEC account so even if you stick with Amex MR points you need a BAEC account to convert NR to Avios. You don’t technically need a Qatar Airways Privelege account but it mught be worthwhile as you can link it to BAEC and transfer Avios instantly between the two. Don’t forget that via BAEC on cash fares you also earn Avios of at least 6 times the base fare excluding taxes which helps build up the Avios stash.
If you’re eligible for the BAPP card I’d open one for the SUB which is pretty generous and adds to the Avios pot.
Also don’t forget that even with the cheapest cash fare it is worth using the minimum Avios to get a £10 discount off the fare – every little helps to keep the fares down.
Also if you do BA Holidays trips and both you and your wife are signed up to BAEC you could earn Silver status which gives you lounge access and free seat selection which makes the airport part of the journey more pleasant.
I think I’d focus less on the companion voucher aspect of the BA Amex cards since even with two vouchers it doesn’t necessarily help as a family of 5 but if you do spend over £15k per year then you’d earn at least one companion voucher her per year which allows one passenger to get a flight for 50% of the Avios or a second passenger to fly for just the taxes fees and other charges.
It might be worth investigating hotel reward schemes but you are then limiting yourself to the big brands whereas the destinations you mentioned have lots of local but decent hotel chains which are good value.
I only focus on airline points and ignore hotel schemes other than Hilton even though I haven’t stayed in a Hilton in the last two years choosing better value from local hotel chains instead.
@AJA good points about Avios options but I don’t agree that hotel points schemes should be dismissed out of hand. I and many on here have had and continue to get tremendous value from finding the sweet spots in the reward schemes of the chains.
Newcomers to our hobby may find it easier to get their heads around a single airline scheme than the challenge of comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the chains but the material on HfP (articles and forums) is a rich seam to mine if you are that way inclined. Where family trips are concerned the options of getting suite upgrades or similar can often enable you to accommodate everyone in style for less than you’d otherwise pay for bog standard rooms.
Certainly Mrs GT and I would never have had two fantastic value stays at the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives, nor be looking forward to 10 days at the Conrad Rangali next year, without making the most of such hotel reward scheme opportunities!
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