So, over the last 4 months, I have accumulated 73,776 Avios Points, which are points you can earn as a part of British Airways Executive Club Scheme. These points can also be earned and used in the schemes of Qatar Airways, Finnair and Iberia too, but I’ll focus on the BA Executive Club here.
This is enough (with a £552 cash fee!) to get a first-class ticket single from London to New York:
If you bought this as a single cash fare, it would cost £10,522 :
So a saving of £10,000 for 68,000 Avios Points!
Of course, I’m doing the usual influencer thing here and exaggerating. Only an idiot would buy this ticket as a single cash fare…
If you buy it as part of a return ticket, then the price drops to £4541 for the round trip. Flights across the Atlantic are almost always cheaper as a return than as single tickets. I think there’s some logistical reason but it’s a bit weird…
Anyway, that’s at least £2000 for 68,000 Avios Points! So saving Avios Points can be a very worthwhile activity. They can be redeemed for flights (usually nowhere near as good value as the above) and you can earn them in a variety of ways:
If you fly with an Oneworld airline or take an Oneworld Holiday Package (e.g. BA Holidays) and credit the flight to the BA Executive Club1.
You can earn them if you buy something through the BA Shopping Portal
(https://shopping.ba.com/), where you earn Avios based on how much you spend at various online retailers. Generally, you get better rates with the cashback sites in my experience.
You can earn them with a Credit Cards like BA’s British Airways American Express® Card. These pay you based on how much you spend on the card each month. New card holders often get paid a bonus in terms of Avios points. In the U.S these are generally much higher than the UK as the fees for cards charged there are higher for the retailers.
You can transfer points from other schemes. Personally, the scheme I convert points from is Sainsbury’s Nectar Points scheme - you can convert these at a rate of 400 points to 250 Avios Points.
You can buy them. There are lots of ways to do this. You can buy them direct from a scheme (like BA, Qatar etc), though unless there’s a very special offer, this is rarely a good idea. BA runs a subscription service, which gives good value at a very high rate (like £2000 a year!) but obviously takes quite a commitment. BA also runs a scheme called “Boost” where you can double or triple the points you have already earned for a cash amount.
There’s probably a load of other ways as well, but you get the idea. So how did I earn 73,776 points in 4 months? It’s a mixture of the above, including making a lot of use of BA’s boost scheme to get extra points.
In those 4 months (from 1st August), I earned 13454 points from using my BA Amex Credit Card. I put virtually 100% of my spending on this card.
I bought a new laptop and used the BA store to buy this from John Lewis and earned 2000 points for using the BA shopping portal through to the John Lewis site and then buying the laptop.
From a few short flights, I earned 1481 points. The trip to Bangkok was paid for by points, so I didn’t earn any points for that trip, except for the flights to Dublin to start it. Redemption flights do not earn Avios points.
From Nectar points converted into Avios, I earned 4750 points. This might seem like a lot, but I made a lot of use of bonus Nectar points via the Nectar app for purchasing particular items at Sainbury’s, e.g:
You can earn a surprisingly large number of points with bonuses. Obviously don’t buy anything you don’t need just for the points, though!
So this comes to a grand total of 21,694 points2. This is where the BA Boost purchase comes in. I purchased 50,832 points (in 4 purchases when I earned the other points) for £466.64. The BA Boost purchase gives by far the best value from cash to Avios points at the moment. You do need to have points to boost though - and I’m fairly sure it doesn’t let you boost the Nectar point conversions either.
There’s three ways to purchase points on the BA site:
I use Boost - if I went directly in to try and purchase the same amount of points:
Then it would cost me over £899 to buy 50,000 Avios Points, roughly twice as much!
(Interestingly, you can buy points in Qatar Airways’s scheme - that also uses Avios points with an 80% bonus right now and it’s still nowhere near as good as the Boost option!).
The Subscription option can give similar value but the issue I have with it is that if the airlines devalue the point redemptions (as they do every year or so), then I’m stuck with a subscription of Avios points that won’t be such great value.
In next week’s post I’ll talk about how I might possibly spend all these Avios points…
Actually, you can do it to any of the schemes that use Avios, e.g. Iberia, Qatar or Finnair. But reduced to BA’s scheme to make it a smidgen simpler.
The maths might not totally add up here because I’ve missed out 9 bonus points from Uber and the fact that I started with a few points after using virtually all my balance to purchase my trip to Bangkok!