[Sticky] How To Redeem British Airways Avios For Best Value

I just booked MAD-JFK in J for 34k BA Avios, which doesn’t jive with your charting, but I’m quite pleased with it.

(MAD-BDL via DUB was my preference, but it was double the avios *and* cash. Half the cash saved will cover the Avis to get my car from BDL)

It's worth mentioning how slow and inefficient (by design?) their website is for award searches. Also, in years past, it's been a practical impossibility to reach a human if anything goes wrong with your booking (and boy that will definitely happen if you try to book a close-in Business Class partner award with American!). Also you should tell people where to look to find their "real" locator code, since you can't check in for your flight with the one BA gives you.

Good summary, Ben. And I’m glad you brought up the fact that you don’t necessarily have to pay the full cancellation fee. For this reason, I will frequently purchase Alaska flights, and just pay the small taxes and fees if I have to cancel/change.

Although I have no issues with the BA website, I will say their app is garbage. There is no way in 2024 that a reward flight finder should have to load in a browser page instead of doing it in app.

It’s also good to book premier economy and use avios to upgrade to business. I find this to be a good deal rather than full outright redemption.

Big fan of Avios. They have the best Qatar Airways availability. MIA-DOH-SEZ in J for 75K miles for instance.

Now, if they could only get a website that worked...not that Iberia's is much better. (It's not.)

IMO, the best use of Avios is the ability to link/transfer instantly to Qatar for QSuite

Just booked last week using 95K BA avios: SIN-DOH-MIA. Over 24 hours of Q-Suites travel.

Flights are constantly being canceled. Also you risk being downgraded with no compensation. Avoid BA

West Coast to Hawaii for only 15K is one of my favorite sweet spots.

Although BA Avios looks like it has a lot of OneWorld redemption partners, many of them (say, IB, QR, CX) hold a large portion of the award inventory for their own programs.

Just look at the BA compensation threads on FlyerTalk. EU/UK261 has specific rules on compensation in the event of downgrade, which covers award tickets. You might have to expend quite a bit of effort to enforce the rules (or contract it out to a claims company), including taking BA to the arbitrator, but you can get there in the end. That's at least more than what can be said for most non-European programs.

Or just fly out of HKG whereby carrier imposed surcharges are not allowed and give BA the finger!

Very poor advice Lucky, advising people to redeem 15,000 avios -1$ given the nature of your blog, thats not the sweet spot. BA has made this the headline cost of tax more recently but actually it is better to choose the equivalent to £17.50 to get the best value out of the avios. That was fixed cost for all Reward Flight Saver before BA introduced the ability to reduce the cash cost further by spending more avios - but it is very poor value to do this.

totally agree. The avios +$1 is almost always not the best option

It is displayed on the manage your booking page if/when you go to, say, select seats.

the other glitch with household programs is if you're transferring avios to a partner airline such as Iberia. You can transfer to Iberia, but you cannot transfer back to yourself if you are in a household account.

I don’t know about the others, but I’ve never seen anything on IB that wasn’t also on BA for the same price in Avios.

I use avios every time on short haul flights in the US to expensive destinations like Vail, Steamboat, Napa, Monterey etc its my favorite use of all miles/points!

@Ben - I'm surprised you didn't write about this. Booking 2 one-way trips with Avios is CHEAPER in surcharges (by a lot) than booking a roundtrip. The reason is you are "taxed" for both flights if a roundtrip originates in the USA. But if you book seperate one-ways, you're only "taxed" on the leg out of the USA. The saving are significant. The bummer is if you're trying to use the Chase Travel Together certificate, you have to book as a roundtrip to extract it's full value.

FlyerTalk has multipe threads about this: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive-club/2044689-why-ba-fees-2-5x-avios-return-originating-us.html

One thing about Avios is that they are often available on short-haul AA flights with 24-48 hours notice in first class. When my father was ill the year before last, there were several times where I had to fly up on short notice or extend a stay by a day, and it was frequently available for 15000 Avios (now a little higher). I was able to leverage an AMEX bonus and move 100k MR in, so I was getting $400 tickets for essentially 11k MR.