Taxes on BA flights from London

[Rossy]

Hello, I’m looking into potential long-haul holiday destinations for Jan 2023 and have a decent volume of avios and a 241 voucher to play with – we’d want to travel economy to keep cash prices down. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious correlation between distance and the taxes charged. Is there a rule of thumb around which destinations are typically less than others? Does time of year have an impact? I don’t suppose there’s a chart for this? If not I might have a go at writing a script to scrape this data instead.

[The Savage Squirrel]

Rossy, there’s no way you should be looking at Avios and 2-for-1 for long haul economy travel.

If you want to keep costs down just pay cash for the economy tickets and save your Avios.
If you want to use your Avios towards an economy ticket then just convert them to Nectar and use them to buy your food. You can then put the cash you saved towards economy tickets – and you will do better this way. Save your 2-for-1 for another time.

Here’s a good starter article about this:

https://www.headforpoints.com/2021/04/01/what-is-the-best-use-of-avios-points-2/

[ChrisC]

If you are going to try and scrape and analysis date you need to be looking for the BA surcharges not proper government taxes.

[zio]

@Rossy the cash element BA charges on avios bookings is mostly a made-up figure they like to pretend is tax but which in fact is trousered straight by BA.
There are some proper taxes involved, notably Air Passenger Duty. There are 2 distance bands for this depending on if the distance from London to the capital of your final destination country is up to, or over, 2000 miles. The APD also depends on class of travel, with tax for economy being half (give or take) what you pay in any other cabin.
As the Savage Squirrel says, long haul avios bookings in economy will be poor value.

[Wally1976]

It annoys me slightly that many on here give a blanket “Avios are no use on long haul economy”. I agree that this is true in many cases but certainly not universally. We saved around £3800 on our August Orlando flights (family of 4) for the use of 150,000 Avios (included 1 Annex 3 companion voucher).