Points on booking double shown on table?!

[netanya]

Hi there,

I’m new to booking with Avios points and I was looking up flights from LON to Sao Paolo – and we have a companion voucher.

According to the table here it would be 75,000 points per person for CW return. When I was putting the dates in it was showing as 150,000 points for the return flight with the companion voucher.

Thinking it should be 75,000 points I put in just two people CW return without the companion voucher, it was 300,000 points. Could the points have gone up that much from what we see in the table, or am I doing something wrong? I would have thought that if it is 75,000 points per person then if I’m using the companion voucher, it should cost the same (plus taxes, obviously).

Any advice would be gratefully received as I’m new to this. Thank you!

[BJ]

No, the prices you are seeing are one way so 2x 75k = 150k return per person. Use a companion voucher and you will pay this for 2 persons. Withouth the voucher it is indeed 300k return for two people.

[netanya]

Ahhhh ok, I was very confused why this was happening with everything I searched. I missed the sentence saying it was one-way. Thank you so much!

[BJ]

If I recall correctly Brazil is one of those vountries where it is cheaper to book 2x one way flights instead of a return trip starting from the UK. You can check this out at BA by searching the cost of a return reward booking versus the cost of UK-Brazil and Brazil-UK separately. If 2x one way are substantially cheaper it is important that you book both directions online becayse if you call to add the return they will recalculate the tax and fees and charge you the highrt return cost.

So what you do is this:

1. Book UK-Brazil for 2 persons online using the voucher plus 75k acios.
2. Book Brazil-UK for 2 persons online with 150k avios but without the voucher.
3. Once you have tickets issued and a PNR for each flight, you then call BA CS and ask them to apply the voucher you partly used for UK-Brazil to the Brazil-UK PNR and refund you half (75k) avios. By doing it this way they do not recalculate tax and fees and charge you the higher price.

Note you will need to have 225k avios to do it this way. If you have only 150k avios you will need to book the return even though the cash element is higher.