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British Airways launching Avios subscription service
We are used to airlines and hotels selling miles and points, and it’s no secret that they generate a very respectable revenue stream. However, British Airways is the one to renovate here for going further and offering a subscription-based service.
You can access the offer page here. Basically you pay a fee monthly or yearly, and then you receive some Avios every month. You can choose from subscribing:
- Monthly with a three-month minimum term, or
- Yearly with a 12-month minimum term, and two-month free
Pricewise the annual plan makes more sense:
Obviously the unit price drops the more you buy, but the difference is negligible so just pick whatever amount that suits you best. You pay between 0.895 and 0.925p per Avios, which isn’t a bad deal.
Note that however, the Avios is deposited monthly instead of all at once immediately. This could be a major issue, as I definitely don’t commit to paying a big lumpsum right now for a slow payback in the next 12 months.
Double Avios with Qatar Airways and Iberia
If you are flying with Qatar Airways or Iberia in the next three months, there’s a double Avios reciprocal offer between Qatar Airways and Iberia which may apply.
You can view the Qatar Airways offer here.
- Book between August 15 and November 30
- Fly between September 1 and November 30
- The flight must be operated by Iberia, and IB or QR coded
- Eligible flights credited to the Qatar Airways Privilege Club receive double Avios
The same offer from Iberia doesn’t have a landing page, but I’ve received email communication on this. If you fly on Qatar Airways and it’s QR or IB coded, you receive double Avios if credited to Iberia Plus.
It’s a weird offer as you must credit your flight to the other program to benefit. Anyway it’s worth keeping in mind, although beware that the two programs may have different accrual ratios, and the tier points are not shared between them.
Convert hotel points into Avios with 25% bonus
British Airways has announced a bonus offer for converting select hotel program’s points into Avios.
You can read more about the offer here.
- Runs until April 25
- The following hotel programs are participating:
- Marriot Bonvoy
- World of Hyatt
- IHG Rewards
- Radisson Rewards
It’s a shame that Melia Rewards is not included.
When it comes to converting hotel points into miles, Marriott Bonvoy is (most of the time) the only program that makes sense. Under this promotion, 60,000 Marriott points convert into (20000 + 5000) * 1.25 = 31,250 Avios, which is not a bad deal.
Save Avios with British Airways’ Multi-Carrier Award
The Oneworld alliance has a unique feature called Multi-Carrier Award, which means if an itinerary involves multiple airline partners, the pricing of the award will adopt a different chart, and it could cost significantly less than travelling on a sole airline.
Airlines have different definitions of multi-carrier and also different pricing systems. You could find BA’s relevant page here. Basically it applies whenever your itinerary includes at least two Oneworld airlines (whether BA is one of them or not), and the following chart is for economy class redemption:
The only deciding factor is your travel distance, whether it’s one-way, open-jaw or return. In general the longer you travel the sweeter the deal becomes, and for other cabin classes you simply multiply the Avios by a factor accordingly:
- Premium Economy: 1.5x
- Business: 2x
- First: 3x
By comparison, the multiplying factors of BA’s regular redemption chart for long-haul flights are roughly 2x, 3x and 4x, although it’s just approximation and varies by distance.
It doesn’t take a genius to tell multi-carrier awards on business or first class can have tremendous value, although the latter is probably much less practical due to availability. An ultra-long 50,000-mile around-the-globe trip in business class costs only 480,000 Avios, plus other fees.
BA’s website can actually price such awards correctly. For example if you want to book Tokyo Narita – Kuala Lumpur – Singapore:
The first option which is a multi-carrier award, costs 35,000 Avios in economy and 70,000 Avios in business. The second option on the other hand, falls into BA’s regular partner redemption and costs 26,750 Avios and 74,500 Avios respectively.
Unfortunately BA’s award search engine doesn’t handle open-jaw or complex itineraries, which are what multi-carrier awards are designed for. You’ll have to come up with your itinerary, make sure there’s availability for each segment yourself, and than call BA’s customer service to book.
Qatar Airways to adopt Avios as its loyalty currency, and free 2,500 Avios for everyone
Qatar Airways, out of nowhere, has announced its decision to switch its loyalty program currency from Qmiles to Avios.
[Implications]
There are currently four airlines using Avios as their currency:
- British Airways
- Aer Lingus
- Iberia
- Vueling, which is a subdivision of Iberia
Although no more details are disclosed yet, we believe that Avios will work in a similar fashion with Qatar Airways. Qatar Airways will have its own partners and rates for earning / spending Avios, but a member’s accounts between all airlines can be linked and Avios can be transferred between them. Otherwise it makes no sense to have one Avios program totally separated from the others.
Existing Qmiles will become Avios at 1:1 ratio. Qpoints and Qcredits will remain in place.
The new move benefits us in four ways:
First, Qatar Airways has a few airline partners that aren’t part of Oneworld. You’ll soon be able to redeem your Avios on flights with:
- Bangkok Airways
- JetBlue
- MEA
- Oman Air
- RwandAir
Second, Qatar Airways has a different redemption chart with British Airways, and redemptions on certain route may be considerably cheaper. You could move your Avios over from BA and save, like what many are already doing with Iberia’s MAD-JFK route.
Third, Qatar Airways also has some exclusive non-airline partners. For example, you could convert Qmiles to Acoor points, although the ratio isn’t appealing.
Last, if you fly a lot with Qatar Airways, you may want to credit your flights to their Privilege Club instead of BA’s Executive Club to enjoy better benefits, while still earning Avios.
[Promotions]
If you are not a member of the Privilege Club yet, register using this link gives you 2,500 Qmiles straightway, which will become 2,500 Avios at some point. You’ll earn an additional 5,000 Qmiles if crediting an eligible QR flight by September 30.
If you are a student, don’t forget to participate in their Student Club program, which offers up to 20% discount on air fares, plus other benefits including additional check-in allowance and fast track status.
3x Avios or 9x Emirates Miles on Your Bicester Village Shopping
Thing are looking brighter in the UK and all shops are re-opening sooner than later. If you fancy a trip to Bicester Village for some luxury shopping, you may also want to bag some extra miles along the way as both British Airways and Emirates have ludicrous offers at the moment.
BA’s offer is here. You are entitled to triple Avios during the promotion period, which is 15 Avios per £4 spent.
Emirates’ offer is here, which is more generous. You earn a 8-time Skywards miles bonus, and that’s a whopping 9 miles per GBP spent! However it’s only valid once on the highest spend during the offer period, so be careful if you plan to make multiple visits.
Both offers run until 31 May. You need to bring your receipts to the customer service desk at the end of your visit, and remember to keep them in case the miles don’t post.
Free 125 Avios Monthly via New Nectar Partnership
British Airways has just announced a new strategic partnership between the Avios and Nectar schemes. The partnership is very extensive and will start taking effect on Monday.
Most importantly, you could soon interchange freely your Avios and Nectar points. The ratio is fixed at 250 Avios = 400 Nectar points. As there doesn’t seem to be any limit or loss to your transfers, essentially Avios and Nectar will be sharing all their earning and burning routes.
And there’s a new way to earn free Avios now, if you aren’t aware yet. There is a browser plugin called Nectar Notifier for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You can learn more here.
Once installed, you can open the plug-in and perform searches which go through Yahoo’s search engines. Websites that support Nectar earning will be highlighted in the search results, and you’ll see pop-ups when visiting them.
Quite useless yes, so incentives are needed for people to use them. You earn 100 Nectar points (62.5 Avios) for installing the plug-in, and then 1 point for every two searches performed, up to 200 points (125 Avios) per month.
You can see how many points you’ve accrued for the current month, and they should post to your Nectar account within a month.
For sure it doesn’t earn you many points however you don’t need to spend much time either. It’s a simple way to top up your Avios account and to keep your points active.
800 Free Avios for filling out a questionnaire
You probably have heard of e-Rewards – it is an enterprise-facing service that distributes online surveys. As an end user (worker?), every time you fill out a survey you’ll earn some rewards, which could be hotel / airline points or other forms of rebate depending on the affiliation you signed up with.
By 15 December, if you register as a new e-Rewards user and complete the first survey, you’ll earn 800 bonus Avios. British Airways’ offer page is here and you need to sign up via this link. Although the offer appears to be global, the sign-up link has a .co.uk domain and you may need a UK address.
I used e-Rewards for a while a few years back. You usually earn between 50 and 500 points for each survey, co-related to the length of it. It’s definitely not rewarding enough for the time spent, so don’t expect too much out of it unless you’re just killing time. It also happens quite often that you get disqualified at the beginning or even in the middle of surveys due to “wrong answers”.
That said, 800 Avios for a few minutes on their website doesn’t sound a bad deal at all. e-Rewards has similar deals with other loyalty schemes too, so you may want to dig around a little bit if Avios is of no use to you.
Listed on BA’s offer page is another piece regarding Rocketmiles – new members get 5,000 bonus Avios after completing the first booking with them. We’ve actually written about it back in June, and now that our chances of travelling are getting slightly better you may want to re-consider using it, and your earning preference doesn’t have to be Avios. Should you want to participate, feel free to use my referral link (or enter code PKUKAYCHOU during sign-up) for 1,000 additional points after your first booking.