What’s the rough cash value of one upgrade voucher?

[yli999]

Hi there,

I wonder if anyone has calculated how much would one upgrade voucher be roughly worth of, in terms of cash value. I vaguely remember someone did the calculation for the Amex companion voucher and turns out to be at least £1000.

There’s one upgrade voucher that’s going to expire soon and we won’t have a chance to travel before that, so I want to sell it to others. Wondering what would be a fair value in that case.

[Aston100]

Minimum £70

How are you going to sell it? Buy flights for random strangers?

[Alex G]

I have two that will expire, and which I personally value at £0.00

I will be taking the 7000 Avios in future

The BAPP voucher OTOH is valuable for many reasons

[NorthernLass]

Is this a serious post?!

[Bill_B]

I guess it would be worth around £70 for short haul flights due to the max Avios option being poor value. But you can save over 100,000 Avios on long haul flights, so that would be £1000 at 1p per Avios. Though it might not be a saving compared with an equivalent Iberia flight, starting from Madrid. And going East it’s harder to get redemptions and you can’t use QR with the voucher.

So it seems highly subjective to me. I was happy with saving 100,000 Avios on a direct flight to GRU.

[Smudgerman]

I used one for my daughter to join us in Nashville later this year. I has estimated that it was worth around 9,000 Avios (being the difference economy/business for a Scotland to London flight) so was comfortable choosing the voucher over the Avios, however I ended up getting 60,000 of Avios by way of value so around £600 for me.

[Froggee]

I pay a bit over £100 per annum in platform fees on my investments held by Barclays which would have zero cost elsewhere so it is certainly worth £100+ to me.

I believe I calculated the value as being £650 on the one redemption I have done using it.

[Reney]

Froggee wrote:

I pay a bit over £100 per annum in platform fees on my investments held by Barclays which would have zero cost elsewhere so it is certainly worth £100+ to me.

I believe I calculated the value as being £650 on the one redemption I have done using it.

@froggee you have mentioned this elsewhere, are you not on the premium current account or the avios card? I have not seen anyone else discuss the need to hold investments in their Barclays account to get the voucher. Just curious and a little confused.

[TooPoorToBeHere]

There is no need to hold investments at Barclays to qualify to have/retain Premier. And there is obviously no need to have investments with Barclays to have the Avios cards.

100% sure as I’ve had both for a fair while.

[Froggee]

@Reney – as per @TooPoorToBeHere

To qualify for Barclays Premier, you either need to meet the “salary” criteria i.e. pay it in or have savings/investments with them of >£100k.

I try not to take the proverbial with (grown-up) financial institutions. Although I could have happily transferred in an appropriate amount of money each month to meet the monthly income requirement and hope they didn’t mind it then going back out again but I would have felt somewhat disingenuous doing so.

This is because I do not really use my Barclays Premier account. I transfer a small sum of money each month as a standing order from HSBC and I have direct debits to pay two infrequently used credit cards from it.

I’m quite happy with HSBC but for many years I have had a second backup current account in case HSBC goes down for longer than their traditional several hour outage. You might say this is overly paranoid but equally it always staggers me how people go nuts when their only debit card stops working and they have no access to funds and you get to read about it on the BBC.

I did have a happy relationship with Tesco Bank as backup current account provider. They gave me lots of clubcard points on my shopping and funding my ISA etc. When Tesco Bank stopped doing current accounts I switched it to Barclays for the sign up bonus and flight voucher.

It seemed easier just to put £100k into investment trusts and pay ten basis points on this then do a questionable monthly transfer as it is clear that Barclays want you to pay in your salary and use them as a primary provider and I wasn’t shifting that from HSBC.

So absolutely, it’s just me and my personal line and where I draw it. Given the value I should be able to get from the upgrade vouchers I’m happy kicking back 15%-20% of that to Barclays for a simple life.

[cwd]

The Barcalys cabin upgrade voucher forces you to use the maximum Avios for the minimum cash amount of £1.

Smudgerman wrote:

I has estimated that it was worth around 9,000 Avios (being the difference economy/business for a Scotland to London flight)

If you’re comparing the £1 option, you may come to that conclusion, however, for short haul, the number of Avios required for a Club Europe seat with the £50 cash amount, can be the same, or less than the number of Avios required for an Economy seat with £1 cash component.

In this worse case senate then, the cash equivalent value of the voucher is therefore £49.

For example, London to Amsterdam, flying out on an off-peak date, and back on a peak date in Business: 18250 Avios + £ 50.00; but with a Barclays Cabin Upgrade Voucher: 19000 Avios + £ 1.00.

Opting for 7,000 Avios points is a better option in this circumstance.