Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

The madness continues …. Iberia’s ‘90,000 Avios points for £200’ ends tonight. Let’s do the maths.

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In all of the years I’ve been running Head for Points, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a deal get as much attention – globally – as the Iberia ‘90,000 Avios for booking 10 flights you don’t need to fly’ offer this weekend.

We’ve certainly had good Tesco Direct deals in the past which were more generous, such as 2,400 Avios (1,000 Clubcard points) for a £10 printer ink which you could resell on eBay.  These were glitches and got no attention outside the UK.  This deal is NOT a mistake – Iberia has been keen to tell us that! – and it is getting huge amounts of traction across the world.

You can book the Iberia deal here if you still want to jump in or find out more.

To summarise:

  • You get 9,000 Avios for every Iberia, Iberia Express or Air Nostrum flight you book by 11pm UK time on Sunday
  • You can earn up to 90,000 Avios per Iberia Plus account
  • You must book on iberia.com
  • Your booking must include your Iberia Plus frequent flyer number
  • Your 9,000 bonus Avios will arrive within 10 days
  • Iberia has confirmed that you do not have to take the flights – you won’t lose the Avios if you don’t
  • One-way flights work fine

So …. if you can find 10 cheap one-way flights on iberia.com for €25 each (Santander to or from Madrid still had availability at that price last night, obviously prices are lowest in Winter) then you are getting 90,000 Avios cheaply.

There are restrictions on using these Avios and I STRONGLY recommend reading my article from yesterday here before booking.

Let’s put the deal in context

I am guessing that between 50,000 and 100,000 seats will be booked under this promotion.  If you think that sounds high, remember that it only requires 5,000 to 10,000 people to book their full quota to hit that number.  You also need to remember that non-UK frequent flyer sites have been going crazy over this deal too – virtually all of them, I have to say, giving less focus to the potential downside risks than we have.

What would 100,000 booked seats mean?

Iberia Group carries 85,000 passengers per day, so this equates to over one full day of passenger numbers

If you assume all of the bookings are for Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, as that is when fares are cheapest, it will add 0.6% to Iberia’s load factor for those two quarters (management bonuses all round)

If Iberia pays 0.75p per Avios to Avios Group (which is my best guess) then it will have to hand over £6,750,000 to AGL

Assuming an average ticket price of £20, Iberia will therefore lose £4,750,000, albeit IAG overall sees no loss

The promotion seems to have wiped out every single Iberia seat priced at under €20 for the next 12 months, and a large proportion of those priced under €25

Iberia will see a disproportionately high number of ‘no shows’ over the next year which could have a longer term impact on planning as they will lose track of the ‘genuine’ no show rate which is how they decide how much they can oversell a flight

It is all very odd and, frankly, probably beyond anything that Iberia thought would happen.  There will be some interesting discussions in Madrid on Monday.  Iberia cannot realistically go back on the deal, however, given that it briefed various websites including Head for Points on Friday about how the offer worked.

You can book via the special offer page here if you still want to give it a go before 11pm tonight.

PS. If you are not a regular Head for Points visitor, why not sign up for our FREE weekly or daily newsletters? They are full of the latest Avios, airline, hotel and credit card points news and will help you travel better. To join our 65,000 free subscribers, click the button below or visit this page of the site to find out more. Thank you.

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2025)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

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Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

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Get 5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

30,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 27th May 2025, the sign-up bonus on the ‘free for a year’ American Express Preferred Rewards Gold card is increased from 20,000 Membership Rewards points to 30,000 points. Points convert 1:1 into Avios (30,000 Avios!) and many other programmes. Some people may see even higher personalised offers. Click here to apply.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 27th May 2025, the sign-up bonus on American Express Platinum is increased from 50,000 Membership Rewards points to a huge 80,000 points. Points convert 1:1 into Avios (80,000 Avios!) and many other programmes. Some people may see even higher personalised offers. Click here to apply.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

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The Platinum Card from American Express

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There is also a British Airways American Express card for small businesses:

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There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

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Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Category

Iberia and Club Iberia Plus

Comments (418)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Ian says:
    25 Jun25 June 10:43

    I got all the emails with the IB number on it. However, I paid with Amex and none of the transactions is showing up, not event as pending. Has anyone had the same problem?
    Is it because it was paid in euros?

    • DrPositive Snell says:
      25 Jun25 June 10:53

      Possibly I had one not showing up on Amex card which was paid in euros. Wait a few days and it should appear on your statement.

    • guesswho2000 says:
      25 Jun25 June 11:00

      Yeah, some of mine were in EUR, some in GBP. The GBP ones are pending, the EUR ones nowhere to be seen, but I did get a push notification for each transaction on my iPhone.

    • Attila says:
      25 Jun25 June 11:00

      I can confirm this too. Transaction made in euros will take a couple of days to appear on your statement.

      • Ian says:
        25 Jun25 June 11:01

        Thanks all for confirming 🙂

        • TripleB says:
          25 Jun25 June 23:51

          Interestingly the bookings I made with my mastercard debit cards (from two different high street banks) still aren’t showing up (not even in pending transactions) yet the ones I made with my Visa credit (with a 3rd financial institution) hit the transactions list (not the pending transactions list) within a matter of an hour or two. All were euro transactions on UK cards.

  • Rob Mc says:
    25 Jun25 June 13:14

    Reading the terms and conditions again, nowhere does it state that a flight must be taken. Just the flight needs to be booked. It states the avios will be withdrawn if a refund is taken. You will not earn avios if you do not fly (the earning avios) so perhaps this is where the twitter account could be getting confused.

    • Simon B says:
      25 Jun25 June 13:50

      Also, if you do what Iberia want you to do, i.e. book some flights, receive AVIOS, spend AVIOS on further flight(s), by the time the original flights are not taken the avios have been used on a booking, or potentially even flown.

  • Richard says:
    25 Jun25 June 13:54

    But as the article states, it is just misinformation from someone who was replying on Twitter. The article goes on

    I forwarded the Twitter message above to the Iberia spokesperson with a note that it appears that they are sending incorrect replies and here’s the email that I got back:

    You are right, the answer provided on Twitter is not right.

    The Avios will be added on our customer’s Iberia Plus accounts within 10 days of the ticket having been bought.

    so we will be credited with the points 10 days after booking anyway.

  • B R says:
    25 Jun25 June 14:10

    Expect a lot of clickbait from blogs wanting to continue high traffic levels by spreading FUD. We’ll know more in 10 days. Patience.

  • @mkcol says:
    25 Jun25 June 14:48

    Is this now the most-commented upon thread?

    • Claire says:
      25 Jun25 June 15:37

      If it’s not, it certainly will be in about another 7-8 days!

  • Jimbob says:
    25 Jun25 June 16:55

    Would have loved to be a fly on the wall at the Iberia marketing meeting this morning

    • the real harry1 says:
      25 Jun25 June 18:21

      You shouldn’t be working in marketing if you can’t make a promotion like this sound wildly successful – it can be spun as a great success internally in so many ways.

      The math can be made to stack up; think about recruitment costs of new consumers (getting people to buy IB for the first time); decent % of points will be clawed back come Dec 1st; a good load factor analyst will be working out which flights can safely be judged to have a high no-show factor so increase the over-sell total; say you used 90K points for a flight in First [‘One idea is that 96,000 Avios will get you a roundtrip ticket in American’s A321 first class between Los Angeles and New York.] – what’s the real variable cost to IB – is it much different to the £250 paid for the 90,000 Avios?

      etc etc

      • Jimbob says:
        25 Jun25 June 18:29

        As long as they can buy Avios for less than 0.3p, then I’m sure the maths will work out for Iberia.
        Someone must know the wholesale price

        • Rob says:
          25 Jun25 June 18:34

          0.75p I think. Iberia loses a lot of money, Avios Group makes a lot of money, and it may or may not net out for IAG depending on whether people redeem for flights or third-party redemptions like hotels.

      • CV3V says:
        25 Jun25 June 21:38

        @ Harry

        On that article, its all just a lot of speculation about speculation, none of the arguments stand up against any kind of real world test. I dont want to break it down point by point, not enough space. This IB promo has attracted massive worldwide interest, inexperienced points collectors jumping in and now second guessing themselves combined with websites keeping their site visits up by keeping the speculation going. Makes me hark back to the good old days of 3V cards and NS&I saving account, or Tesco veg (bought individually) – it all seemed so simple back then!

        The veterans on here know not to listen to customer services, especially on twitter, stick to the published Ts and Cs. See what happens in less than 10 days, and then again in December.

      • Thomas Howard says:
        26 Jun26 June 15:47

        The big unknown is the extent that they devalue the Avios before anyone can use them.

        • the real harry1 says:
          26 Jun26 June 16:17

          That’s very much a small unknown in my books 🙂

          If you’re going to worry yourself silly about something, choose something more likely to have a big impact on your Avios enjoyment, eg
          – can’t move Avios to BAEC
          – change T&Cs, such as no points awarded if flights not flown
          – ditto points only awarded after flight dates

        • the real harry1 says:
          26 Jun26 June 19:01

          – move points to BAEC leaving -90K @ IB, IB force you to buy the points back to zero the a/c
          – IB & BAEC join platforms in a few months and the points are made one total, ie they net off the -90K

  • the real harry1 says:
    25 Jun25 June 18:05

    I believe I opened my IB a/c on my old passport number; my wife has 2 passports…simple enough to cancel the -90,000 IB a/cs and open new ones 🙂

    • CV3V says:
      25 Jun25 June 21:47

      Thing is, unless someone is actually planning on flying with Iberia then people could use any old number for their passport number, perhaps thats how those in the US were able to open multiple accounts. There are a few other tricks now that i think about it. Cant imagine IB are validating passport numbers with the issuing authorities across the world for a loyalty scheme.

      That said, i genuinely have to renew my passport this year, which may be interesting.

      • Andy says:
        25 Jun25 June 22:46

        They could ask for a scan of the passport/ID card to verify the account I suppose…

        • CV3V says:
          26 Jun26 June 08:38

          In which case someone would raise security issues with email etc. They could ask, but point is that they dont.

  • EvilGazebo says:
    25 Jun25 June 18:21

    Related question: assuming this all works as described I’m going to need to get an extra 10k into wife’s new IB account for the redemption we want.

    She is a member of my BA HHA but has little or no avios in her BA account. No balances anywhere else either (very remiss).

    Options appear to be either

    a) buy the avios from either IB or BA
    b) refer her for a new Amex Gold and try and spend the £2k to get the bonus sharpish.

    Any other bright ideas I’m missing?

    • the real harry1 says:
      25 Jun25 June 18:23

      which card would you be referring her from?

      • EvilGazebo says:
        25 Jun25 June 18:39

        Currently PR Gold but looking to upgrade to Plat soon so either.

        • EvilGazebo says:
          25 Jun25 June 19:24

          Can’t reply to your comment below for some reason Harry. Anyway, yes that has always been the plan. But I’m more concerned about the speed of getting the 10k avios for her to secure the seats I’ve clocked. No clever ways I can transfer my AMEX or BA points to her?

        • EvilGazebo says:
          25 Jun25 June 19:25

          Or rather comment above. No good with threading me.

        • luckyjim says:
          25 Jun25 June 19:31

          You don’t have any clubcard points? Would only need £40 or so.

        • EvilGazebo says:
          25 Jun25 June 20:23

          No, clubcard balance has rather withered and died of late.

        • Genghis says:
          25 Jun25 June 21:04

          Amex points have been known to slip through to someone else’s IB acct (my wife, same surname a few years ago).

        • EvilGazebo says:
          26 Jun26 June 07:24

          Thanks, I did wonder if that might be worth a shot.

    • pauldb says:
      26 Jun26 June 13:27

      Does the redemption you want maybe have an avios&money option?

      Have you tried pairing your Amex MR account with her IB account … you never know.

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