Wanda is now Avios Insurance, and Laithwaites is back at The Wine Flyer

Two of the quieter corners of the Avios world have just been rearranged, and almost nobody has noticed. IAG Loyalty, the company behind Avios, has retired the Wanda name from its travel insurance and relaunched it as Avios Insurance. At the same time it has brought Laithwaites back into The Wine Flyer, four years after ending a partnership with the same wine merchant.

Both matter if you're the sort of collector who tops up a balance between flights, because these are two of the few places where Avios flow in and out without an aircraft being involved.

Here's what's actually changed, what hasn't, and where that leaves your balance.

What has changed, at a glance

Both are worth knowing about, but neither should change how you collect. The bigger question, which we come to below, is where you spend.

Wanda by Avios is now Avios Insurance

Wanda launched in 2025 as IAG Loyalty's first move into insurance, sold under a standalone brand that didn't carry the Avios name. That has now been reversed. The small print on the Avios Insurance site puts it plainly: Avios Insurance is "formerly known as Wanda by Avios", and it's a trading name of Open Insurance Services UK Limited.

That wording matters, because this is a rename rather than a withdrawal. The same regulated company arranges and administers the policies. If you already hold a Wanda policy, your cover runs on unchanged to renewal, at which point you move onto Avios Insurance terms.

What you get, and what you collect

Avios Insurance now sells single-trip and annual multi-trip travel cover, with car insurance listed as coming soon and home insurance flagged for 2027. Verified from the official site in August 2026, the travel policies offer three levels of cover with up to £15,000,000 of emergency medical and repatriation cover, up to £7,500 of trip cancellation cover, an excess you pick at £50, £100 or £150, and 24 hour emergency assistance. The site also states that its Premier single-trip and annual multi-trip covers hold a five star Defaqto rating, which is a claim worth checking against Defaqto's own listing if the cover level is what's swaying you.

To collect on a policy you need to be 18 or over, a UK resident and a member of The British Airways Club, and you must link your BA Club account to the policy within 60 days of buying it. Joining BA Club is free, and you'll need that membership number for almost everything else in this article too, so it's worth doing first if you haven't already.

Does the Avios protection survive the rebrand?

Yes, and this is the part most write-ups have missed. Avios Insurance still includes Avios Protect, which covers the reinstatement of up to 500,000 Avios redeemed through ba.com for unused, non-refundable prepaid expenses under the cancellation, curtailment and travel delay sections of the policy.

Read the condition attached to it, though, because it's the whole story: reinstatement applies only if the Avios haven't already been returned by your travel provider or by Avios Group. For a standard British Airways reward flight, they usually will be. You can cancel a BA reward booking up to 24 hours before departure and get every Avios back, plus your taxes and fees, less £35 per person. We wrote about why that £35 cancellation policy is one of the best features of a reward flight, and it's precisely why Avios cover is a narrower benefit than it first sounds.

The realistic gap it fills is the last 24 hours, when BA's own refund window has closed, and prepaid Avios spending outside a simple reward flight. That's a genuine risk, just a small one. Treat the cover on its insurance merits and the Avios as a modest bonus, not the other way round. At a sensible valuation of around 1p per Avios, the maximum 1,000 Avios on a travel policy is worth roughly £10, so it should never be the reason you pick one insurer over another.

Laithwaites is back at The Wine Flyer

Until 2022, British Airways sold wine in partnership with Laithwaites under the BA Wine Flyer name. IAG Loyalty then ended that arrangement and took the whole operation in house, relaunching it as The Wine Flyer. Four years on, Laithwaites has returned, this time as fulfilment partner: storage, order handling and delivery.

IAG Loyalty's position, is that the change is about "improving operational efficiency, resilience and the delivery experience for customers" and doesn't represent a transfer of the business or a change in ownership or strategic control. IAG Loyalty keeps the brand and the buying. Laithwaites moves the boxes, and its own-label wines are being folded into the range.

What hasn't changed

For collectors, the numbers are the reassuring part. Checked on The Wine Flyer's own Avios page in August 2026, none of the mechanics have moved:

• Collecting: at least 5 Avios per £1 on every bottle, once your BA Club account is linked. Promotional periods push this higher, and subscription cases carry a bonus on each order.
• Spending: you can cover up to 95% of an order with Avios. At checkout you log into your BA Club account, choose "edit basket and spend Avios", and move a slider to decide how many to use.
• Delivery: free on orders over £100. A Cellar Pass gives unlimited free delivery for a year for £19.99, or 3,000 Avios.

That Cellar Pass is a useful sanity check on what Avios are worth here: 3,000 Avios for something priced at £19.99 in cash works out at roughly 0.67p per Avios. Our full guide to earning Avios with wine goes deeper into stacking promotions and subscription cases.

Where should I spend my Avios?

These two changes are a good moment to ask the bigger question, because our answer surprises people. The non-flight options are convenient and they all work, but they cluster tightly around half a penny per Avios. Reward flights sit in a different band entirely.

Cash figures below are honest guides, verified in August 2026, and taxes, fees and carrier charges are payable on top of the Avios on every reward flight. On most British Airways reward bookings that cash element is capped at a flat, published amount rather than the full airline surcharge, a structure you may know as Reward Flight Saver.

Avios prices also move with BA's peak and off-peak calendar, and off-peak dates cost meaningfully fewer Avios for exactly the same seat, so shifting a trip by a few days is often the cheapest saving available.

Use our Avios Calculator for exact numbers on your own route and dates.

Read that table twice before you cash in a big balance. The same 10,000 Avios that buy you £50 of wine or a £50 discount on an iPhone is worth £150 to £400 when it goes into a premium cabin. Avios is an airline currency, and it's priced like one.

The Avios Shop deserves a note here, because it has quietly become the most generous of the non-flight options. As of August 2026 it lets you part-pay up to 50% of the cost with Avios on selected products, up from the 50% cap it introduced last year, and the range now runs well beyond Apple to Dyson, Le Creuset, Smeg, Tom Ford and luggage brands. A higher cap isn't a better rate, though. The implied return still sits between 0.50p and 0.56p per Avios on the current listings, so what has really changed is how much of a purchase you can clear in one go, not what your Avios are worth.

None of which makes wine a mistake. If your balance sits under 10,000 Avios, a long-haul redemption is years away and a case of something good isn't. Our piece on how not to waste your Avios makes the same argument in reverse: the worst outcome is a balance that expires unused.

How to spend Avios beyond reward flights

Beyond flights, upgrades and the two products above, The British Airways Club and Avios currently let you spend Avios on hotels through Avios Hotels, car hire with Avis and Budget, products in the Avios Shop, British Airways Holidays packages, seats and extra baggage, PizzaExpress vouchers, LeShuttle crossings to France, conversion into Nectar points, and donations to the BA Better World Community Fund. You can also part-pay a cash booking with as little as 1,000 Avios.

One pair of names worth untangling while you're here. The Avios Shop is where you spend Avios on products. The Avios eStore is the opposite: a click-through portal where you collect Avios on online shopping you were doing anyway, at hundreds of retailers, for no extra cost. Our article on racking up Avios online covers which retailers pay best and the one step people forget.

The full picture across every Avios airline is in our list of airlines where you can earn and spend Avios besides British Airways.

Fast ways to collect Avios without flying

Insurance and wine both belong to a category that has grown quietly large: earning Avios on the ground. If you fly two or three times a year, the fast ways to collect Avios have very little to do with aeroplanes, and this is where most of your balance will come from. Our roundup of the secret ways you can collect Avios digs into the ones hiding in plain sight, from airport parking and Heathrow Express to lounge bookings and rent payments.

How to earn Avios for free

Knowing how to earn Avios for free matters more than it sounds, because several of these cost you nothing beyond a little admin:

• Avios for Thoughts: a survey panel run in partnership with BA Club and the other Avios programmes, paying a joining bonus and roughly 20 to 350 Avios per completed survey. Expect a lot of email, so use an address you don't mind filling up.
• Referrals: the British Airways American Express cards pay a bonus for each friend who takes a card, subject to an annual cap.
• Shopping portal: click through the Avios eStore before you buy online and the same purchase earns Avios on top of whatever the retailer charges. Go direct and it earns nothing, so the portal click is the whole trick.
• Nectar: convert supermarket points you already hold, at 400 Nectar points for 250 Avios. This runs both ways, and BA puts the return leg at 400 Nectar points for every 400 Avios. There is a 400 Avios minimum and no upper limit.
• Credit card welcome offers: the single biggest lever, covered in our guide to Avios from credit card welcome offers.

How to earn Avios faster

If you want the shortest route from everyday spending to a reward seat, the order looks like this. An Avios-earning credit card comes first, because it earns on everything you already buy. Then the shopping portal, then partners you use anyway: hotels, car hire, LeShuttle, wine, and now insurance. Flying comes last for most collectors, which is the opposite of what people expect.

Stacking is what separates a slow balance from a fast one. If a £120 eligible order earns 600 Avios from The Wine Flyer, paying with the British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card adds 180 card Avios at 1.5 Avios per eligible £1 until 6 October 2026, for 780 Avios in total. From 7 October 2026, the card earns 1.25 Avios per eligible £1, adding 150 card Avios to a qualifying £120 order for a total of 750, assuming the same 600 Avios from The Wine Flyer. Do the same on an insurance policy, a hotel booking and a supermarket shop, and the numbers compound. Our guide to boosting your Avios earnings sets out the full stack, and if you want a target rather than a trickle, we have mapped out an Avios strategy to earn a long-haul flight in under a year.

What these changes mean for your Avios

On the surface, it’s a small update: a new name and a new logistics partner. But it also shows the direction IAG Loyalty is heading in. Avios is being pushed steadily further into everyday spending, with insurance, wine, groceries and retail all now feeding the same balance. That's good news for anyone earning, because the ways in keep multiplying.

Earning points has become much easier, but getting good value when you spend them is still the harder part. That’s why it pays to focus on how and when you use them. Below roughly 25,000 Avios, spend them on whatever you actually want, because a long-haul redemption is far enough away that waiting costs you more in expiry risk than it gains in value. Above that, ringfence the balance. Once you have enough for a single long-haul premium leg, every case of wine you buy with Avios is quietly costing you about three quarters of what those same Avios were worth in the air.

The catch, of course, is that those are exactly the seats everyone else wants. British Airways guarantees a minimum reward allocation on every flight from Heathrow and Gatwick, at least eight in economy, two in World Traveller Plus and four in business, but on popular routes they are gone within hours of release. That's the real constraint on a growing balance, not the earning, which is why it pays to watch British Airways reward flight availability rather than check it. Our guide to the smartest way to find British Airways reward seats covers how to get in front of a release rather than behind it.

Turn a growing balance into a boarding pass

Reward Flight Finder tracks British Airways and Iberia reward seat availability up to a year ahead, so the balance you've been quietly building through wine, insurance and everyday spending actually becomes a trip. Set an Availability Alert for the route, dates and cabin you want and we will tell you the moment seats appear.

RFF Gold Members can point Flight-by-Flight Search at one specific departure, or use the Club Suite Filter to watch only the flights carrying British Airways' newest Business Class cabin. Set your alerts up today, keep buying the wine because you like the wine, and let your Avios do the job they are actually good at.