What is the best value Avios flight per mile?

What is the best value Avios redemption per mile flown?  Or, put another way, what’s the furthest you can fly for the fewest Avios?

With travel slowly starting to open up – although I’ll be the first to say that you won’t be heading to a lot of places listed below in a hurry – I thought it was worth having another look at where you get the best value.

We have put together a list of the flying distance of each long and mid haul British Airways route and compared it with the Avios required for a Club World off-peak redemption.

Distances are measured using the ‘great circle route’ ie. the most direct path between origination and destination.

If you ever need to work out the distance between two cities, we recommend Great Circle Mapper at gcmap.com.  Use airport codes in the search box, eg LHR-CPT for London Heathrow to Cape Town, and click ‘Distance’.

Hopefully this gives you a better idea of the value of different routes, although you should remember that ‘value’ is subjective.  If you don’t want to fly to Kuwait, for example, it doesn’t matter how ‘cheap’ a redemption would be.

As we always say, the ‘best’ Avios redemption is one that takes you to somewhere you really want to go.  With the exception of South Africa, both the ‘best value’ top four and ‘worst value’ bottom four destinations are unlikely to be top of your bucket list.

The winner based on ‘Avios needed per mile flown’ is Cape Town.  10 Avios will get you one mile in a Club World flat bed on that route.

It was in the top ten of the ‘Avios per minute’ chart but has now climbed to the very top of the list. This is great news since Cape Town – in addition to being great value – is also a fantastic city to visit.  Cape Town is one of the destinations in BA’s route map that should technically be priced in a higher Avios category but isn’t, so it makes sense that it should be excellent value.

Most of the top fifteen remain the same when calculated by mile or by minute. Abuja, Jeddah, Kuwait, Moscow, Johannesburg, Mexico City, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose (CR), San Francisco, San Jose (CA) and Sydney all perform well.

Take a look and see what you think. The table shows you the Avios per mile you need to redeem to get a Club World redemption.

If you want to compare these results to ‘best Avios redemption by minute of flying time’, you can find those results here.

I also recommend this HfP article which shows every British Airways route and the Avios required to fly it.

BA won’t be flying all the routes below for some time – if ever

The list below was produced in early 2020.  It is NOT reflective of the route network today.

British Airways has said that some of these routes will not return post-covid.  However, we have not removed those destinations from the list.

There are two reasons for this:

• I don’t seriously believe that British Airways is willing to permanently abandon cities such as Seoul and Abu Dhabi – especially as it may have spare capacity if other parts of the world remain closed

• whilst BA has announced some route cancellations, I am sure that more will follow

Here is the ‘best Avios redemption per mile flown’ chart, based on BA’s route map at the start of 2020.  Thanks to Andrew for his help with this.