I try out the British Airways ‘Return to England’ £33 Covid test from Qured

Links on Head for Points may pay us an affiliate commission. A list of partners is here.

British Airways has partnered with a number of Covid testing companies since the start of the pandemic, most of which are PCR testing providers.

It has now announced a new partnership with Qured (pronounced ‘cured’…..) to offer a £33 inbound test that satisfies the requirement for a negative Covid test before arriving in England.

The process is quite clever, and lets you avoid the hassle of trying to find a test provider in the country you are visiting. It is based on a lateral flow antigen test, which means it isn’t totally accurate but better than nothing ….

It is also much cheaper than a PCR test – £33 with BA’s discount code – making it a cost-effective way of testing before you return to the UK.

Here is how it works:

You order your test before you depart the UK and take the kit with you
You schedule a video call with Qured up to three days before your return flight to carry out the test
You receive your results and a test certificate within 20 minutes

British Airways offered to let me test the service – so I did!

I gave the Qured test a trial

Ordering the home test kit is easy and can be done on the Qured website here. The headline price is £39 but the BA promo code ‘BATRAVEL15‘ will reduce this to £33.

You have to select a reason for the test – which can include a simple diagnostic if you just want to check your Covid status – but in this case you should choose the ‘Return to the UK’ option:

You also have to enter a few personal details including your address.

The test kit arrives via free next-day delivery, provided you book before 3pm. It is all in a small box that you can easily pack into a bag or suitcase.

Once booked, you can schedule a call with a health advisor to take your test and get your results validated. This ensures that you perform the test correctly and don’t cheat, as this test has been validated by Public Health England as a valid way of entering the UK.

You can book this call for whenever you want and there are plenty of slots available, although they are limited to 9am-6pm UK time.

Cleverly, you don’t actually have an appointment with an individual advisor: instead you join an online queue and wait to be attended. This took a matter of seconds for me, and means that it doesn’t matter if you are a few minutes early or late for your slot.

On the call, the Qured health advisor will take you through the process of swabbing and performing the test. If you’ve done a lateral flow test before you are probably familiar with the process, which essentially requires you to dunk your swab in the liquid before dropping it onto the test cassette itself.

I will spare you the vivid details of my self-swabbing. Residents of South London will be pleased to know that I tested negative:

(Somebody can correct me on this but I assume C means ‘control’ to ensure the test has been carried out correctly and and T is for the actual Covid ‘test’ result.)

Once the 20 minutes are up you can take a photo of your test with your ID and send it to Qured. Qured will verify it and send you a test certificate in return:

You can upload your certificate into BA’s VeriFLY app if you wish, which will speed up your time at check-in.

The whole process was quick and easy thanks to the guidance from the health advisor, and got me a Government-accepted certificate within an hour.

It will be interesting to see how testing requirements evolve with the rollout of vaccines, although I imagine they will be here in one form or another for some time. These cheap and effective lateral flow tests are a great way of testing for your return.

How to earn Avios points from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (December 2021)

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

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

British Airways BA Amex American Express card

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up, no annual fee and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending ….. Read our full review

British Airways BA Premium Plus American Express Amex credit card

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the UK’s most valuable credit card perk – the 2-4-1 companion voucher Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & two airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

30,000 points and an unbeatable set of travel benefits – for a 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, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios:

Capital On Tap Business Rewards Visa

The most generous Avios Visa or Mastercard for a limited company Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus:

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios 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.

(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)

Category

British Airways and Avios

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Roger says:

5 Mar5 March 09:09

Sounds like a good idea on the face of it, but it will become a nightmare in practice. There will be stories of not being able to get through, being cut off mid interview and the “control” not working, rendering the test invalid.
Verifiable vaccination is the way to go.
- Yuff says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 09:33
  
  That is the way it is going
  - Anna says:
    
    5 Mar5 March 09:39
    
    But that won’t prove you’re not infected, surely?
    - Char Char says:
      
      5 Mar5 March 10:35
      
      Exactly the whole thing is a sham like test and trace which was proven to be useless!
      - James says:
        
        5 Mar5 March 11:07
        
        Was it proven useless? In this country maybe, but that was down to the sh!te delivery model. A sound model should have worked well, as in many other countries. The problem is not with the concept itself.
- Char Char says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 10:35
  
  When vaccine doesn’t guarantee immunity or stop transmission, whats the point……
  - Rob says:
    
    5 Mar5 March 10:52
    
    It doesn’t need to, it just needs to reduce it substantially.
    
    The natural R level of covid is 3, apparently. This is what happens if everyone carries on with usual lives as in 2019. Not hard for the R to be below 1 if it is only 3 naturally given the high effectiveness of the vaccine.
    
    You also forget the fact that it is virtually impossible to die from covid if you are vaccinated, even from a mutated strain. That’s good enough for most people.
    - Jonathan says:
      
      5 Mar5 March 11:13
      
      Exactly. Vaccination is to reduce mortality & severe infections requiring hospitalisation not to achieve “zero Covid” like NZ/Aus etc have pursued.
      
      Covid is not like flu as some would maintain (it has a much higher natural transmission rate & mortality) but once vaccines are fully rolled out it’s impact on healthcare & deaths will be reduced to the level of other diseases like flu which we tolerate without shutting the economy down.
      
      Aus/NZ etc will also shift to this strategy once they have rolled out vaccines.
    - Sandgrounder says:
      
      5 Mar5 March 11:19
      
      +1 we aren’t New Zealand, zero Covid won’t happen nor should we aim for it. Just our reliance on RO-RO freight makes that impractical. Mass vaccination will keep the R below 1 and reduce the death rate drastically, potentially well below that of seasonal flu. The type of people who die from Covid after vaccination will be so weak they would probably have died from the next thing they caught, or just be run-over-by-a-bus unlucky.
      - Callum says:
        
        5 Mar5 March 12:53
        
        I can fully accept the argument that we SHOULDN’T aim for zero Covid like New Zealand, but I’ve never seen a substantiated reason for why we CAN’T do it. RORO freight certainly isn’t one of them as there are many techniques you can use to mitigate it (negative test and full isolation while in the UK, swap to UK drivers, require vaccination etc).
      - The real John says:
        
        5 Mar5 March 15:28
        
        Has anyone tried to claim that we absolutely “can’t”? The argument is that we shouldn’t because it would be so impractical and expensive (although it might have been cheaper than furlough and the consequences of furlough)
      - Callum says:
        
        5 Mar5 March 22:30
        
        The Real John – Yes. The person I replied to… I guess they could claim it’s not what they meant, but countless others regularly make the same argument.
        
        Though the reasoning is normally that it’s “too late”, but Australia has also proven that wrong.
Alison Martin says:

5 Mar5 March 09:40

Will this service be available to non BA flyers too? I’m hopefully flying with EasyJet in June.
- Rhys says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 09:41
  
  It’s available to anyone.
Adil says:

5 Mar5 March 10:27

How does the video call work.. concious that i can never get audio/video calls to work from the UAE even when using a VPN
- Rhys says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 11:00
  
  It’s in-browser.
Mr(s) Entitled says:

5 Mar5 March 10:47

Am I missing something? I do not see any unique reference on the test in the picture. What is to stop someone simply posting a picture of a negative result? Easy to do if a family is traveling and only one returns a positive.
- Rob says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 10:48
  
  Nothing stopped you photoshopping a PCR certificate either.
  - Mr(s) Entitled says:
    
    5 Mar5 March 12:47
    
    Yes, but this isn’t even photoshopping. This is merely using multiple tests and then submitting a negative across a group of people or simply finding a picture of a negative online.
    
    There will always been means to circumnavigate rules but this process appears to have not made any effort with regard security and accuracy. As presented here, it is simply not fit for purpose.
    - Erico1875 says:
      
      5 Mar5 March 16:11
      
      The strips are serial numbered
- Jimmy says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 17:15
  
  Theres clearly someone watching when you take the test, which I think helps!
The cyclist says:

5 Mar5 March 10:57

Didn’t know you resided in sarf London Rhys, hopefully a good bit!
- Rhys says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 10:58
  
  I love it down here!
Zoheb says:

5 Mar5 March 11:45

Can you use these to go abroad to counties that need a Covid test?
- Rob says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 12:12
  
  Not if they require a PCR test.
Asya Sonnichsen says:

5 Mar5 March 11:46

Is anything stopping sometime from using this in the UK? My mother in law is visiting from Denmark and needs either an antigen or PCR test in the 24 hours before travel in order to be allowed to fly there. Obviously the antigen is cheaper and easier to do 24 hours before as you don’t have to post it somewhere.
Kelvin says:

5 Mar5 March 12:14

Presumably you call a UK number, this could be very expensive from some countries on a UK mobile
- kitten says:
  
  5 Mar5 March 13:30
  
  You’d have to have a phone that can do data and either a wifi you can plug into or a data allowance so as to use Skype or other VPN
  - kitten says:
    
    5 Mar5 March 13:31
    
    – other VOIP, sorry, not VPN