British Airways lets passengers redeem its award currency ‘Avios' for reward flights. These are tickets where, instead of just a part payment in points, the entire airfare is paid for with points leaving the passenger to simply cover taxes and fees. The airline also offers “Reward Flight Saver” deals, where you don’t even have to pay the full taxes and fees, just a flat admin fee that can be as low as £1.
Some airlines charge for reward flights based on a geographical zone system. Instead, BA uses a distance based system to determine how many points you need to exchange for a ticket.
Maximising your value with a distance-based reward scheme requires a different approach than the regional zone-based systems used by some other airline loyalty programmes, such as American Airlines AAdvantage. As an example, AA would charge you the same number of AAdvantage miles to fly between London and New York as it would fly between London and Los Angeles. With BA shorter, direct routes generally burn fewer points than they would within a regional zone schema, i.e. BA charges fewer points to fly from London to New York than it does to LA.
Finding value means find those sweet spots. Instead of finding countries or even entire continents that you can fly to cheaply, distance-based sweet spots tend to be cities that are far enough away to make a trip worthwhile, but close enough to avoid bumping into the next pricing tier. The British Airways Club programme, previously known as the British Airways Executive Club, can offer a lot of value for these types of trips.
Understanding and maximising the value of British Airways’ distance-based system can be the key to getting the most out of your Avios, particularly if you are seeking to grab a deal for a luxury flight in business class.
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Find available reward seats with British Airways and Iberia.
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You can spend as little as 4,000 Avios for trips of up to 650 miles using the distance-based system, which can offer value when combined with Reward Flight Saver deals. Otherwise, a lot of the available flight redemptions under 650 miles are quite a short distance away (e.g. London -> The Channel Islands) and in these cases paying with cash might be the better alternative- particularly if there is a good low-cost airline deal available.
But, with a little research, you can get the most bang for your buck by looking at redemptions for destinations, which are further away geographically but still within the 650-mile range.
Avios & Distance
Did you know that these destinations are within 650 miles of London?
Barcelona (BCN);
Copenhagen (CPH);
Munich (MUC);
Nice (NCE);
Stavanger (SVG)
Flights up to 1,151 miles in distance, can include:
Budapest (BUD)
Dubrovnik (DBV)
Lisbon (LIS)
Stockholm (ARN)
Warsaw (WAW)
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Here’s a table that breaks down short-haul British Airways flights by distance & zone and the necessary Avios spend for a reward flight.
Understanding this chart helps with getting an idea as to how far you can fly and at what Avios cost. It will also help you from unnecessarily booking a trip to an airport that sits in a different zone because it's ever so slightly further away from an alternative and therefore you have to pay the price for a higher distance tier.
British Airways’ distance-based system can offer a lot of value and this table can help you find those travel sweet spots- by distance and Avios spend.
Alternatively, Reward Flight Finder (RFF) lets you Search destinations and see exactly how many Avios you’ll need to redeem for the available travel dates. Better still, premium RFF members can see where in the world their points could take them using the Map View, which takes all the complicated calculations out of the equation.
With RFF Map View, you can simply put in your departure location, inbound & outbound date ranges and view every location on the map available to fly to with BA and the Avios requirements for a reward flight redemption- both off-peak and peak!
RFF Map View
Spin the globe in a digital sense with our premium tool for Gold and Silver members.
From the image above, you can see that we’ve looked at Paris as our destination. Within the months of August and September using August 25th as our date of departure, a peak fare period- it would cost us 4,500 Avios to book a reward flight in Economy and 9,000 in Business Class. The map view is also ideal if you don’t know where you want to go, saving you from undertaking multiple destination searches and giving you inspiration, based on your points balance.
To drill down further on reward flight dates and their points cost, across a wider period of time, you can always use the Availability Calendar too.
Long Haul Flights
Understanding the distances to destinations when flying long-haul to further-flung parts of the world can help you avoid paying for more expensive zones by opting for cities that just fall within nearer distance zones.
For example, if you were flying with BA from London to Singapore (SIN) or Kuala Lumpur (KUL), this would be a flight to Zone 8. But British Airways also flies to Bangkok (BKK) from London, which is slightly closer, so it falls into Zone 7, meaning that fewer Avios are needed. This can be particularly useful if you are planning to use your Avios to fly on a journey that involves legs on other airlines, outside of BA and its partners. E.g. Flying to Bangkok and changing to another flight there will use fewer Avios than using Singapore Changi Airport as your transfer point.
Below is a table that breaks down long-haul British Airways flights by distance & zone and the necessary Avios spend for reward flights. By focusing on the farthest locations within any given zone, you can literally fly further for the same Avios.
The Map View on RFF gives you a far simpler way to visualise where you can fly, and with how many points. This map-based view shows the Avios required to obtain a reward seat, to each BA destination, without the need to work out the distances involved. It also lets you see the difference in Avios required for flights on both peak and off-peak dates.
The Map View is available to Gold and Silver members of RFF. Why not take advantage of the free trial of Gold membership, to see the advantages of our elite tier?
Douglas
