Part Pay With Avios - A Quick Guide

Part Pay With Avios - A Quick Guide

Collecting Avios needn’t mean building up enough for full British Airways reward flights. You can also use your Avios to get a discount on regular BA flights paid for in cash.

It’s a more quickly achievable goal - you can use as few as 1,000 Avios, but, as you have to be logged into your BA Executive Club account to see this option at the time of flight search, it may be one you are not aware of.

Part paying with Avios does generally give you lower value for your Avios than redeeming in other ways so it’s useful to make some quick comparisons and decide if this is right for you.

How it works Unlike British Airways reward flights, where you’ll need an Avios flight finder to chase the reward seats, the part payment option is available on every cash booking.

When you are logged into your BA Executive Club account and choose a flight, you will see Part Payment with Avios as an option on the summary page before you pay.

You will be offered a scale of prices you can discount your flight by, arranged in bands, for instance, £10 off with 1,000 Avios and upwards.

The higher the cost of your flight, the greater the number of Avios that you will be able to offset against it, and the value declines the more Avios you use. Here is an example of an economy return flight to Athens: ● £10 off for 1,000 Avios (1p per Avios)

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£18 off for 1,980 Avios (0.91 per Avios) £26 off for 3,250 Avios (0.80p per Avios) £42 off for 6,600 Avios (0.64p per Avios) £68 off for 13,600 Avios (0.49p per Avios) £90 off for 19,300 Avios (0.47p per Avios) £120 off for 26,500 Avios (0.45p per Avios) £160 off for 36,500 Avios (0.44p per Avios) £250 off for 57,000 Avios (0.44p per Avios)

You cannot use Part Pay with Avios to pay the whole amount.

Be careful not to use the ‘book with cash and upgrade with Avios’ option as that is a different concept for when you want to bag a higher category cabin.

Note also the difference between ‘Part Pay With Avios’ and ‘Pay with Avios and Money’. The latter option is offered only when you are booking an Avios redemption ticket, i.e. a reward flight, and you don’t have quite enough points and opt to buy some extra.

Other airlines it can be used on

The part payment option can be used on British Airways flights, American Airlines flights between the UK and North America and on British Airways codeshare flights with selected partner airlines including Aer Lingus, Iberia, Cathay Pacific, Qatar and Qantas (see the full list and other details of the scheme here).

Getting best value To calculate the value of your Avios, take the discount you receive for part payment and divide by the number of Avios you would need to use. For instance, if you need to pay 1,000 Avios for a saving of £10 then each Avios in that instance is worth 1p. If you need to pay 19300 Avios to get £90 off then the per-Avios value is 0.47p.

You’ll notice if you do the maths, that the value of your Avios declines after the first band of part-payment options. So, while they may be worth 1p each if you put the lowest amount towards a BA economy flight, the higher bands represent lower values of 0.5p or 0.6p each.

This means you’ll get more value from your Avios by taking the smallest discount off several flights rather than using all your Avios at once. Psychologically, though, it may feel more of a treat making one chunky saving rather than £20 off here and there.

Generally speaking, the price per Avios for an economy flight should not fall below 0.8p to make the redemption worthwhile, so you should do some quick sums to ensure this is the case. Look out also, for occasional BA promotions on Avios redemptions.

Remember, however many Avios you decide to use at once, you will always have to pay the fees and taxes for the flight. It’s the same on reward flights when the entire fare is otherwise paid with points.

If you are purely looking for Avios' best value and are not set on a flight discount, you should look at the Avios link up with the Nectar rewards scheme, which, if you are a member, now means that you can convert your Avios points into Nectar points.

Nectar points are worth 0.5p each when used to shop in Sainsbury’s, Argos, eBay and other retailers in the scheme. However, as you can transfer at a rate of 1 Avios to 1.6 Nectar Points, this means that on conversion your Avios will actually be worth 0.8p, which could be regarded as an absolute minimum value.

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