r/avios

Hello,

I need a one way flight in December (~21st) from Nyc to Athens. All the business class flights cost around 120k avios which feels like pretty bad value, idk if this is bc it is high season, or if there is a better way to book other directly on the BA website.

I do have enough avios to pay that, but idk if I wanna do it.

Any advice?

What’s people’s experience with paying, or rather not paying, to choose seats when booking seats with Avios?

I recently flew long haul business class with my partner using Avios and a companion voucher and as well as airport taxes we also ended up posting to choose seats so we were sat together, both legs. The seat bookings added about £500 to the booking and I can’t help but think I was held hostage 🤣

I didn’t want to risk not sitting next to my Mrs for 8 hours for what was an exciting part of the holiday for us. (I know some people would love this 🤣).

Do you guys always choose seats? Or are you always sat together anyway or what?

Hi, we've met with a bit of bad luck and would like to ask if anyone here has been able to find a good workaround. QA recently changed their rules for flight upgrades using Avios. Basically new QA PC customers cannot use their Avios points to upgrade family/friends unless their account is 30 days old + they have flown recently. My husband is our primary card holder and his QA account is brand new. We have a QA flight that we have been hoping to upgrade for a while. Our original plan was Amex > BA > QA > upgrade. However now it seems that my husband can move all avios points to QA from BA and upgrade his flight but he cannot upgrade mine. We are looking for workarounds. Amex has said that he cannot transfer his points to me (I have an old and active QA account). One option was are exploring is Amex > BA > BA family pool > ??? Is there anyone here who has managed to find a work around? We have a special vacation coming up and the points to upgrade and it would be a damn shame if this new policy prevents us from using our points.

It also seems like as time closes in, rewards flights are closing. Can we only use avios to upgrade rewards seats? Our base ticket is a cash fair ticket (N class). ARN > DOH

Hi there, I am a BA Amex customer and have collected around 21k avios points. I heard that after one year or so you could get a “free flight” based on your avios. Does anyone know how this works?

Probably a silly question, but it’s not entirely clear to me how to best use their rewards.

So I have approx 220 000 avios I live in Ireland but can easily get to london if I look up air lingus site they want €2 200 per person to fly Vancouver via London. Economy is much more reasonable 405€. If I choose Economy what's the chance I can use avios to upgrade to business?

If I choose BA Vancouver to london business is 110 000 points per person 1 way which seems expensive.

Hello first post in here, for clarity i have been an AMEX user for around 11 months using the british airways card and i am £600 away from getting the companion voucher.

I have around £17000 avios and spend over £12000 on the card in the year.

This is my daily spend card and I am 21 years old.

I am pretty new to this and have just racked them up whilst daily spending aswell as on flights.

Can someone give me some advice on how to boost my avios and where to spend them, because to me £12000 spent with 17k seems a bit low?

Hi all,

I picked up 2x business tickets yesterday to Hong Kong 1 way for 110k avios + £699. Looking at the tickets on the BA website they're coming up as c.£5k each. Does that mean I've just bagged c.4p per avios? I used the companion voucher as should have been 220k points.

It's my first time booking so would this be considered a good deal?

I have some 100k points locked up in Avios, which I transferred from a credit card into BA-Avios at some point. I had made a household account, adding my spouse and 2 kids. After not logging into kids accounts for a couple of years, I realized they have been locked out. All attempts to recover them failed because customer support always asked for last transaction for verification, which I can't remember. I've tried correlating to my account transaction but nothing worked. I've called several support options, like avios club number, chat support etc., all ended with the same result.

To make it worse, I was no longer able to transfer those points to Qatar, and this always failed without any explanation why. Suspecting this could be due to these locked kids accounts, I deleted them off my household list and was able to transfer successfully.

Now, when I try booking through Qatar with Avios, it tells me I am restricted to only those in my family list. Visiting my dashboard on qatar > Profile > Friends & Family, I see that this does not have anyone (probably a separate list from BA-Avios household, which still has my spouse). And I see this - without an option to add anyone new -

"You can start adding members after you’ve been a Privilege Club member for 30 days and have collected Avios by flying or using one of our co-branded payment cards."

I have had my Qatar login for much longer than the 30 days. I also flew their flight recently, although I routed my earned points to Alaska airlines. I don't have their credit card.

What is my option to use these points to book for people not on this list?

Just to share a good news story on reward flight booking for competitive routes.
Recently booked 2 CW reward seats for LHR-HND at t-355 days by calling the call centre at 1am (2am for the return as I was on CET). Rang at 00:50/01:50 and got straight through.
So so so straightforward, I am delighted to say. Agent nabbed the seats on BA7 and BA8 (new club suite on A350), linked the bookings so I only paid the companion voucher Avios rate and didn’t have the shenanigans of paying full rate for return leg and getting 50% refunded.
Thought I would share a straightforward experience for those who are planning and have read all the horror stories!

On 5 June this year, my wife to be and I were removed from our BA flight to Florence at the gate. We were travelling to our own wedding.

The gate manager told us the flight was overweight and that we'd been taken off based on our CIV (Customer Importance Value) score. He was pretty upfront about it — Avios bookings rank lower than cash bookings, so when they need to offload someone, we were first in line.

We'd spent years collecting Avios. Used them for what felt like a meaningful trip. And it turns out that's exactly why we got bumped.

We ended up on a flight to Pisa after a lot of complaining, paid €220 for a taxi, and arrived in Florence over 6 hours late. I've filed a UK261 compensation claim for £440 and I'm still waiting to hear back.

I don't think most people collecting Avios know this is how the system works. Cash passengers are protected. Avios passengers are expendable. Worth knowing before you redeem on anything that actually matters.

Happy to answer any questions, and if anyone has been through the UK261 process with BA recently, I'd love to know how it went.

With the new changes in relation to award bookings, my understanding is that I cannot book for anyone in my family in addition to me (correct me if I’m wrong). I am traveling with my 11 year old daughter. Since I can’t use my Avois for her and she’s underage, it’s asking me to book her as a solo traveler. Will it be complicated if I turn up at the airport with her? I plan to purchase our seats together. The flight has two legs. Has anyone bought two separate tickets for themselves and a child? What was your experience?

Today I transferred Membership Rewards from Amex to my British Airways Executive Club account. The Avios arrived successfully and are showing in my BA account.

My BA and Qatar Privilege Club accounts have been linked correctly for a long time, and my Qatar account even shows the combined Avios balance. However, whenever I try to transfer the Avios from BA to Qatar, it fails. I even tried to book a reward seat and pay using my Avios sitting directly in my BA account but it also doesn’t work either.

The error message I get on the Avios website is “Something went wrong. Please try again.” and the one on the QR app/website tells me to contact British Airways.

I’ve already called BA Executive Club and they confirmed they can’t manually transfer the Avios and have raised a support ticket, but they said it could take 4–7 days to hear back.

The problem is that I’m trying to book Qatar reward flights and I’m worried the award availability will disappear while I wait.

I’ve seen a few posts mentioning that BA sometimes places a temporary security hold after an Amex → BA transfer, and that it can take around 7–10 days to clear. Has anyone here had this happen recently and did you manage to find a quicker workaround?

Hi i’m new to using avios. I’ve linked my amex to avios and was wondering if i have to go through the app and pay that way to earn avios, or if i can simply pay in store through apple pay and it will automatically track and give me avios.

Any help is appreciated thank you!