Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get a 2p per Avios discount on British Airways cash flights this weekend

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If you are opted in to British Airways Executive Club marketing emails, you will have received a very interesting offer in your inbox yesterday.

If you book a BA flight for cash by midnight on Monday, you can ‘part pay with Avios’ and receive 2p per Avios in value.

Full details are on ba.com here.

Part pay with Avios offer

The offer is VERY flexible:

  • you can book in any cabin
  • you can book for any travel date
  • you can book one-way or return flights

The one minor snag is that BA CityFlyer is excluded so you can’t book the London City or Southampton departures.

All flights must depart from the UK.

Can you pay for your entire flight with Avios?

No.

Unlike Virgin Atlantic, which lets you ‘part pay with points’ up to the entire value of your booking, British Airways only lets you pay the base fare, excluding all taxes and charges.

There are further limits as part of this deal.

For return flights, the only discounts available are (per person)

  • £5 off for 250 Avios
  • £18 off for 900 Avios
  • £32 off for 1,600 Avios
  • £56 off for 2,800 Avios
  • £80 off for 4,000 Avios
  • £100 off for 5,000 Avios

For one-way flights, these numbers are halved:

  • £5 off for 250 Avios
  • £9 off for 450 Avios
  • £16 off for 800 Avios
  • £28 off for 1,400 Avios
  • £40 off for 2,000 Avios
  • £50 off for 2,500 Avios

Each option gives you 2p per Avios, which is exceptionally generous. If you are making a BA booking this weekend, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this offer up to the maximum number of Avios allowed.

No trips planned? You should be able to get a discount on a BA e-voucher

If you have no flights to book this weekend, you should be able to use this deal to get a discount on a British Airways e-voucher.

This is because, when you cancel a flight which uses ‘part pay with Avios’, your e-voucher arrives as 100% cash. You lose your Avios but get a voucher for the full original value of the flight.

Here is an example.

I found a return flight to Athens which was £174. I had to do quite a bit of trial and error to get a price that maximised the cashback.

The base fare is £105 and the taxes and charges are £70. I just managed to get the base fare over the £100 threshold to maximise the discount.

If I book this flight using the maximum discount, I will pay £74.72 and 5,000 Avios.

I can cancel it under the ‘Book With Confidence’ guarantee. I would (based on BA’s own T&C for ‘part pay with Avios’) receive an e-voucher for £174.72. This would usually arrive within 10 minutes and would be valid against any future cash ticket I book, but can’t be used to pay taxes on an Avios booking.

The exact ba.com wording is:

If you used Avios to pay for part of a booking, can you still apply for an eVoucher?

Yes. You’ll receive an eVoucher that equates to the full value of the original booking, cash and Avios combined, that you can redeem against future bookings. Please bear in mind you won’t receive any Avios related to the original booking as a refund.

The only snag I can think of is that, online, you can only redeem four e-vouchers per booking. You can get around this by ‘merging’ vouchers. If you had eight e-vouchers of £100 which you wanted to use for an £800 flight, you could make two random £400 flight bookings, each using 4 x £100 vouchers. These could be cancelled to get 2 x £400 vouchers and then used for your £800 flight.

Athens is not necessarily the best example because the taxes are relatively high. Looking at our comments, the sweet spot is a one-way from Jersey to London Gatwick. Taxes are around £8 so any fare of £58-ish would let you cash out the maximum £50 for 2,500 Avios.

Please check the comments to this article before acting on it in as readers have added a lot of interesting new data and ideas.

Conclusion

If you had been planning to book any British Airways flights, this offer is a great opportunity to redeem some Avios for a discount at an exceptionally high rate.

If you don’t have any bookings planned, think about whether it is worth ‘buying’ an e-voucher by making a booking and then cancelling it immediately for an e-voucher.

You can find full details on this page of ba.com.

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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

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

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

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

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

Your best beginner’s card – 30,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

80,000 bonus points and great travel benefits – for a large fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, and the standard card is FREE. Capital on Tap cards also have no FX fees.

Capital on Tap Visa

NO annual fee, NO FX fees and points worth 1 Avios per £1 Read our full review

Capital on Tap Pro Visa

10,500 points (=10,500 Avios) plus good benefits Read our full review

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

British Airways American Express Accelerating Business

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

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.

American Express Business Platinum

50,000 points when you sign-up and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

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

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (488)

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

  • BJ says:
    21 Aug21 August 19:12

    Having explored this most of the day I have concluded I cannot make it work for me either by booking now or selling avios for an evoucher. A bit of a disappointment given the obvious values and opportunities.

    1. Living outside Heathrow catchment area, shorthaul connecting flights are not appealing when we can fly to most key European destinations direct from Edinburgh with other carriers. If I lived within LHR catchment I’d definitely jump on this.

    2. The option to exploit part pay plus UUA exINV is attractive but remains less so than 241 option given fluctuation in fares and reward availability. The relatively simple flexibility of a normal 241 redemption also compares favourably to the flexibility of FTV resulting from part pay UUA option.

    3. Plan to use it to fund trip to USA direct exEDI on AA next summer also fails to make sense as the AA fares to PHL are totally incompetitive at the moment and will probably remain so.

    4. I don’t want to feel compelled to take an extra longhaul trip bty September 23 just for the sake of exploiting this opportunity.

    A bit of a downer for me but I’m sure many others will make this one work very well for themselves.

    • Yorkieflyer says:
      21 Aug21 August 19:39

      Yes my conclusion too

    • Andrew says:
      21 Aug21 August 20:35

      I’m a solo traveller so not a 241er and concluded a few years ago that traditional Avios bookings were poor value so I’ve been cashing out my Avios at Sainsbury’s/eBay since January at £8/1000 so this at £20/1000 is excellent value for my approach to get cash fares at reduced prices.

    • FFoxSake says:
      21 Aug21 August 20:45

      If John’s comment on previous page about the ability to use a GBP eVoucher against an ex-EU booking priced in EUR is accurate then that might change the maths very positively for me.
      There have been some good looking ex-AMS/MAD/CDG return fares to US in Business (sub 1k GBP) recently, even allowing for a RFS positioning flight, so they will provide some decent opportunities for hefty Tier point runs at those rates for status chasers…

      • John says:
        21 Aug21 August 20:56

        OK I’ve just encountered a problem. I do have some domestic flights I want to book, but I also have some vouchers in euros and swiss francs from 2020 which I want to use up.

        You can’t get the avios discount when you use a voucher…. so I thought I could make some dummy bookings to get some 2p/avios vouchers, and then use all the vouchers together …. but as someone mentioned earlier you can’t use multiple vouchers in different currencies!

        So I have just tried to use the eur and chf vouchers to book some gbp flights, to find out if this will convert them to gbp vouchers and then see if they can be combined!

        • FFoxSake says:
          21 Aug21 August 20:58

          Good in theory… should be an interesting data point for all of us once you know the result!

          • John says:
            21 Aug21 August 21:44

            Yes it worked, converted all my eur and chf vouchers plus some avios into one flight that I want to fly, and the remaining balance as a single voucher in gbp. I guess if you had more than 4 vouchers you could do the same to combine them into a bigger voucher (if you wanted a flight that was more than the value of 5+ of your vouchers)

            Took some time to find flights priced very close to the voucher values and my Amex now has BA transactions of 36p, 41p, 65p etc

        • Stuart says:
          22 Aug22 August 09:45

          I used three vouchers in eurs, chef, gbp on one flight but had to call up to do it.
          I held the price and generated a booking reference and gave this to the agent.
          They used all the vouchers and refunded the £10 holding fee

  • Hotinnewcastle says:
    21 Aug21 August 19:19

    Sorry in response to prev messages above…..you were right, I got the e voucher, all within 20 mins. But I did it from the link in the email for the original booking not via the app, which was not playing ball.

  • Boi says:
    21 Aug21 August 21:16

    I am really envious. I have avios but having moved to canada I wonder how this will benefit me.
    I dont expect to come to europe soon so might be tough getting BA bookings.

    Am I missing something?
    (live in west canada, nearest big airports are Vancouver, calgary and edmonton if that makes a difference)

    • John says:
      21 Aug21 August 21:45

      Isn’t there a Canadian card which gives avios and something similar to a 241?

    • Dubious says:
      22 Aug22 August 06:24

      I don’t know if you have BA status, but I faced a similar question, and I rationalised that I will need 4x BA coded-flights to maintain my status at some point, so I am likily to make at least one booking on BA.com (and although most of my existing flights to date have been cancelled by BA rebooking them is still restricted to their respective routes which might not be helpful next year).

  • Paul says:
    21 Aug21 August 21:16

    Just made a booking…l how quickly can I cancel for the eVoucher?

    • FFoxSake says:
      21 Aug21 August 21:27

      I did it as soon as I had the booking email arrive. Can’t say if it would work immediately. Remember this is BA IT…

  • Paul says:
    21 Aug21 August 21:19

    How many eVouchers can you used per booking? Also to confirm, any ‘change’ is issued as a new eVoucher with the original expiry date

    • FFoxSake says:
      21 Aug21 August 21:29

      According to an EDIT in the main HfP article above :
      “(EDIT: You can now redeem four per booking online according to the comments.)”

    • Andrew says:
      21 Aug21 August 21:54

      4 according to BA’s FAQs

  • Mco says:
    21 Aug21 August 21:37

    Have I got this right?

    The flight I want retails at £1500pp or 150k per person + £600.

    I have 300k which = £6,000

    So instead of paying 300k + £1,200 I will get the flights for £3,000 plus have £3,000 left as credit?

    • John says:
      21 Aug21 August 21:50

      No. You can buy that flight for £1400 + 5000 avios each.

      You can buy a random flight (see previous comments for ideas) costing about £150 for £50 + 5000 avios, then convert it into a voucher for £150. (This £50 is new money coming from your card.)

      Apparently you can book 4 people for £200 + 20000 avios and convert it to a single voucher for £600.

      When you have vouchers totalling just under £3000 you can then buy the flights you actually want. You cannot use avios at the same time as using vouchers, and you can use a maximum of 4 vouchers in a booking.

      Thus if you manage to get 5 vouchers of £600, you need to combine 2 of them by finding a flight for £1200 then converting that into a voucher.

      • fred says:
        21 Aug21 August 23:07

        What happens if you make a booking with 4 vouchers and then cancel the booking. Are they aggregated into one?

      • fred says:
        22 Aug22 August 00:04

        Sorry, wrote my message before fully reading your email…. so you can combine… cheers.

    • VerdantBacon says:
      21 Aug21 August 22:01

      No you haven’t got it right. The trick here is to book flights you don’t want, reduce their cost by £100 by redeeming 5000 avios and then cancelling the unwanted flight to get the full cash value of that flight with 0 avios in the voucher.

      Effectively converting 5000 avios into £100 to use for flights you do want

  • Let's fly says:
    21 Aug21 August 22:01

    Dublin was a good route. 1 adult, 7 children.
    Paid £316.16 + 40,000 avios. Voucher for £1115…

  • Luke says:
    21 Aug21 August 22:04

    This really is a stunning deal. I just booked CE LHR-EDI round trip for 4 pax. It cost the same as ET plus 20,000 Avios, and we will earn 6,500 Avios back. 13,500 Avios for 8 CE upgrades. That has got to be the cheapest TP earning upgrade I’ve ever managed.
    *Yes I realise I could have made ET cheaper and would have earned some Avios in ET, but it looks great to me!

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