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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.

When I click on ‘Price Breakdown’ in ba.com, I see this:

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.

I am shown the full range of discounts because my base fare is over £100:

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.

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:

Nectar American Express

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

American Express Platinum card Amex

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 card

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

Comments (497)

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

  • GaryE says:
    22 Aug22 August 10:01

    Booked 4 one way JER-LGW cost 10,000 plus £38 closest I could get to only paying tax. Have applied for voucher – how long is it taking people to get these vouchers – it says up to 7 days but I have seen comments that they have had vouchers within minutes.

    • Andrew says:
      22 Aug22 August 10:04

      Around 3-5 minutes for me.

    • FFoxSake says:
      22 Aug22 August 10:06

      About 10 minutes wait to get eVoucher emails after applying.
      Same experience twice yesterday.

      • GaryE says:
        22 Aug22 August 10:16

        Thanks – system must be overloaded booked at 9.40 and cancelled at 9.50 – has gone from MMB but obviously taking longer to create the evoucher – or something has gone wrong!!

    • Alan says:
      22 Aug22 August 14:08

      I have done five on the same route, I submitted them separately and the return time varied from inside five minutes to about thirty.

  • Nadeshka says:
    22 Aug22 August 10:09

    Is the e voucher in the name of the person on the flight or the person booking?
    Have some avios orphaned in a family member’s account after getting a refund after dissolving the household account. Wondering if I can book a flight for myself from their account using this offer to get a voucher in my name?

    • Memesweeper says:
      22 Aug22 August 11:54

      The voucher has no name at all. Just a cash value.

      • Nadeshka says:
        22 Aug22 August 12:34

        Great, so it’s not tied to their account and I could then use it later? What’s stopping people reselling these (Ts &C’s?)
        I guess worst comes to worst I would get them to book the next set of flights for us and just pay the excess cash myself.

        • Chrisasaurus says:
          22 Aug22 August 13:34

          Well firstly a risk of being caught by BA, secondly a risk of being ripped off by a thief and thirdly the very thin market for second hand evouchers – who knows their right mind would exchange actual cash money for one off someone else even if they knew them?!

        • Chrisasaurus says:
          22 Aug22 August 13:35

          That’s not the worst coming to the worst that’s precisely the suggestion being made

          • Nadeshka says:
            22 Aug22 August 14:37

            Well I just don’t want my relative to have to faff about on any future booking for me, so would be nice if I could get the voucher “in my name” so I can use it directly.
            Have booked the flights in my name, email and with my credit card so will just see who gets emailed the voucher.

          • Nadeshka says:
            22 Aug22 August 15:20

            To confirm in case anyone else tries this, the flights showed up in my MMB (as I’d entered my details in the booking) and I cancelled from there getting an evoucher emailed to me that I can indeed apply to flights from my own account rather than the relative’s.

        • soundnomad says:
          22 Aug22 August 15:37

          Hi , I have similar scenareo but not quite clear. Some clarification would be much appreciated.

          Does the Household account need to be active? Or can this be doen without a household account. I had not got round to setting this up yet. There is 13000 in relative account and 36000 in my account.. Trying to work out how best to do this. If used in two seaparate purchase & refunds – the two resulting vouchers can be used on one single itinerary in the future in just my name?

          Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks

          • Nadeshka says:
            22 Aug22 August 16:53

            In this case my relative is no longer in the household account – I removed them when we had reasonably balanced out our earnt avios (they only joined to book a couple of family trips) but a refund afterwards still went to them although they were “my avios”.

            In this case they sat with me and I booked a flight for myself, paying the cash with my cc but avios obviously came from their account. With my BAEC details on the booking it appeared in my MMB and I cancelled from their to get a voucher for me.

            If you are booking from a household account it will just prorata the avios from each member’s balance.

          • Nadeshka says:
            22 Aug22 August 16:56

            Also household accounts are very quick to set up, they just need to have the same address as you and after you request they’ll get a link for them to agree to join.

            Then you can book flights (including under this offer) from the pooled balance with it taking pro rata amounts.

        • soundnomad says:
          22 Aug22 August 19:00

          Thanks for the info.

          If i book an itinerary for 8 adults I am right in thinking I can just use made up names as I am going to cancel it or will it require real people with passport numbers etc?

          Cheers

          • soundnomad says:
            22 Aug22 August 19:49

            ie i could use my family’s names, the names of real people if push comes to shove, but there would be no requirement to actually prove those people are real to check out the booking and the refund as 1 eVoucher is what I am asking I suppose?

          • Dave says:
            22 Aug22 August 20:13

            If your intention is to cancel the booking and not fly it, the names could be anything. However for discretion I would suggest family member you normally travel with, etc. But yes to book a flight you just need names, not passport details.

          • soundnomad says:
            22 Aug22 August 20:44

            Please ignore.

            I saw Rob’s earlier comment about worst case being refund within 24 hours so just went for it. Worked. Used real people but no need for additional information.

            Ive also just noticed that there is a 50% bonus avios buy avios offer till 30th August. Trying to work out if there is an angle! not seenthis mentioned in the thread so I am assuming not.
            Cheers

  • J says:
    22 Aug22 August 10:14

    Has anyone received an email about their dummy booking? Just got the “We need to speak to you about your British Airways booking XXXXX”… despite me already cancelling the booking for an evoucher yesterday.

    Not sure if I can just ignore this?

    • C says:
      22 Aug22 August 10:31

      I’ve received this email in the past when they’ve needed to take my
      payment details again due to a ticket not being issued in time. I’d ignore it if you’ve got your evoucher through

    • Mike says:
      22 Aug22 August 10:57

      I’m getting this too. It’s because I’ve already cancelled and got a voucher before they had chance to issue the ticket.

  • Fazzy Bear says:
    22 Aug22 August 10:49

    I transfered a test amount of avios last night (1000) from my Amex amount last night and it still has not shown up.

    Im aware it says 3 days but I thought they just write that as they don’t want you to pester them incase it takes longer than usual. Skywards was instant.

    If it takes longer than a day, will mean I miss out of this offer due to technicality.

    • Andrew says:
      22 Aug22 August 10:55

      Yes it does take a couple of *working* days usually. If you have any nectar points they transfer instantly.

  • JDB says:
    22 Aug22 August 11:12

    Can’t work out whether BA will be very unimpressed by the way this has turned out. It cannot be going as they might have expected but they might still consider it a result. Someone I saw yesterday evening who is very mathematical and isn’t an accountant but good at accounting asked if I had seen the promotion as his immediate thought was that it was a well laid trap that will have brought in more new cash than Avios sales and reduced their liabilities.

    • Paul says:
      22 Aug22 August 12:12

      I think for those of us here it’s not gone they way they would have maybe liked however for the majority who will take advantage of this as BA intended, I’m sure the maths will make sense for them.

      • C says:
        22 Aug22 August 12:46

        I’m sure for the majority it has been used in the way BA intended.
        I have done a mixture of booking real flights and claiming some vouchers so they’ve had £800 in cash from me alone this weekend that they wouldn’t have otherwise

  • Patrick Cold says:
    22 Aug22 August 11:20

    Thanks very much for this Rob. One question please, why is this necessary?:

    I can, once the 24 hour cooling off period is over, cancel it under the ‘Book With Confidence’ guarantee.

    • Andrew says:
      22 Aug22 August 11:29

      It isn’t necessary to wait, you can cancel for an eVoucher as soon as the booking confirmation is in.

      • Patrick Cold says:
        22 Aug22 August 11:31

        Many thanks Andrew.

        • GaryE says:
          22 Aug22 August 11:41

          Booked and cancelled within 15 minutes once I had the booking confirmation email from BA. Evoucher took 90 minutes to arrive this morning

          • AFKAE says:
            22 Aug22 August 12:11

            Just plucked up the courage to give it a whirl. eticket receipt 11:57, I went in and cancelled at 12:03 and evoucher at 12:06.
            Happy days.

  • Paul says:
    22 Aug22 August 12:13

    I’m hopeful that any changes to these eVouchers down the line in terms of their use or an expiration amendment will only be positive!

    • FFoxSake says:
      22 Aug22 August 13:51

      Original ones had an expiry of Apr 2022 but now all extended.

      Wasn’t there also some talk here that ultimately any unused eVouchers would have to be refunded as cash by BA? It would therefore be in their interest to extend the expiry again beyond Sep 2023.

  • JSemity says:
    22 Aug22 August 12:22

    £60.80 + 20k avios for an e-voucher for £460.80. Excellent value. Will be doing a few more. Thanks for the heads up Rob & feedback shared from all.

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

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