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Hi there.
I have two companion vouchers. Planning a trip to Rio de Janeiro with family of four.
I don’t have enough Avios to pay a full return using Avios, which leaves me with this quandary regarding use of companion vouchers:
(a) part pay with Avios, even if that means getting a lower value per Avios, and use companion vouchers, knowing that it will be a long time before I have enough Avios for a big trip again.
(b) just pay with cash, save the companion vouchers for a later trip (we go to Brazil every other year) and earn the Avios from this trip.
Just trying to weigh up the cost/benefits here. Any thoughts welcome.
Will your current vouchers still be valid in 2 years?
How many Avios do you have?
What would cash prices likely be for the flights?
Do you have Avios that you could boost or time to accrue further Avios via a subscription?
When are you looking to go and which class?
If you answer these questions then we can totally help. The objective is to get to Rio whilst not wasting your Avios. Most on here value Avios at one penny. It could well be that you could get much more than a penny’s value from Avios to the point it is worth buying more. Or not.
Do you mind splitting up the booking i.e not sitting together and if there are cancellation get split up? If you don’t mind depending on your answers to Frogee’s question one option maybe you could buy 2 tickets on points and 2 on cash (one adult paired with one child – assuming young children).
Thanks for replies.
Currently have 280,000 Avios in household account. Maybe that actually is enough when companion vouchers factored in?
Current vouchers won’t still be valid in two years. But we will certainly have earnt news ones by then.
We would want to sit all together. Economy or premium economy if it’s not too steep an upgrade (don’t know how it works with Avios).
Make sure you understand the difference between booking with avios and upgrading with avios, they are not the same thing! You can only use the 241 on the first option.
I always suggest my preferred option in this kind of situation, which is to book 2/3 family members with avios and the 241, and make a BA Holiday booking for the other 1/2 people. You get all the benefits of the BAH, including delayed payment.
You can pay to sit together, even on separate bookings, and while it’s expensive, if you can’t pick seats for free it’s the only way to virtually ensure you’ll sit together.
You also have the option of using one of the vouchers to get a 50% avios discount for yourself, and book the rest of the seats for cash/BAH.
Oh – it really makes me go GRRRRR when I edit a post and it goes into moderation. I wonder if this one will go too or will appear immediately. I made a mental arithmetic whoopsie (blush).
Hello – you have plenty Avios.
Return to Rio is 80,000 + £200 in economy (peak dates) and 70,000 + £200 off peak.
So using both companion vouchers, it would cost 160,000 Avios + £800 for all four of you on a peak date.
That seems pretty good value to me assuming you wish to fly on a date when cash prices are above the cheapest I can see of £550.
If you were to fly one off peak and one peak date then you would have enough Avios for premium economy. The difficulty is only two seats in premium economy are guaranteed to be released versus eight in economy class so you would be fortunate to get four seats. The pricing is also quite a bit more.
The other wrinkle is that you could save further money by booking your flights as two one-ways. Rio is one of the very few BA destinations where fees are minimal on the return leg if booked separately.
So what you would wish to do is…
Book LHR-RIO one-way using both companion vouchers for the four of you at 80,000 Avios + £400. You can do this online.
Separately book RIO-LHR one-way for the four of you for 160,000 Avios + £31.20 (yes, only £7.80 taxes per person). You can also do this online.
Then you would look to call or tweet BA and ask for the companion voucher to be applied to the return leg resulting in a return of 80,000 Avios. Note this is a concession by BA and it might only be possible to get this concession if the return leg was not available when booking the outbound.
Don’t forget you can boost up to treble the Avios points you’ve earned in the last 30 days for about 0.9p per point, much cheaper than part-paying.
Don’t forget you can boost up to treble the Avios points you’ve earned in the last 30 days for about 0.9p per point, much cheaper than part-paying.
Can you explain this please?
You certainly have enough Avios for four in economy with two vouchers.
On a peak date with BA that would cost you 80,000 Avios plus £800 for two seats.
A pair of premium economy seats would required 155,000 return and business class 220,000. Those numbers will be a bit lower on off-peak dates.
In theory, you can use the vouchers with Iberia. Business class return from Madrid would set you back as little as 125,000 Avios plus £360 for two seats though you would need to add on the cost of getting to Madrid. The main difficulty though is likely to be insufficient business class redemption seats released for all four of you and you’d also hit the same issue with BA premium economy.
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