A couple of weeks ago, Avios suspended the ability to transfer between your British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus accounts. If you’d been waiting patiently for that feature to return, there’s good news: the ability to transfer has been reimplemented.
There’s a bit of a change to how transfers are processed now, but for most people this will be an improvement.
You can transfer your Avios from one account to the other here. As you can see in the above screenshot, you have a few options:
- Transfer your individual Avios to or from the following programs:
- British Airways
- Iberia
- Vueling
- Aer Lingus
- Loganair
- Transfer to Qatar Airways Privilege Club
- Transfer to Finnair Plus
- Convert to & from Nectar (this is a loyalty program in the UK for stores including Sainsbury’s, Argos, and more)
- Convert from BPme Rewards
- Transfer to friends & family
To transfer from, say, British Airways to Iberia, you’d select the top option. On the next screen you’ll be prompted to first select which account you’re transferring from, then you’ll select which account you’re transferring to. You’ll be prompted to log in, then you’ll likely have to set up two factor authorization if you haven’t done that in the past.
Head For Points has some useful additional context about Avios transfers. Previously, when transferring to/from Qatar Airways, Finnair, and Loganair, you were creating a permanent link between your accounts, but that wasn’t the case with Iberia, Aer Lingus and Vueling. With this update, transfers between British Airways, Iberia and Vueling will now be permanent. That should make transfers more speedy going forward once your accounts are linked.
In order to be able to transfer between accounts, your first and last names need to match, as does your email address on each account. If you have your date of birth registered under your profile, that needs to match too.
Another positive is that in the past, an Iberia Club account had to have been open for at least 90 days in order to transfer to or from it. That’s no longer the case, so you can now open a brand new Iberia account and transfer points to it immediately. That could be awesome if, for example, you wanted to take advantage of their current award sale.
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Does having household account affect transfers under this new scheme?
Getting 404 error on the link.
It seems the page is browser sensitive. Worked in Chrome.
Where do people like to store their Avios. I’ve been storing my with Qatar but open to other ideas if one program is better than the other.
I picked QR because they are transparent about the expiration date and my BA account is in a family account and BA uses miles pro rata, so when I make a BA award booking, I transfer only what is needed to make sure i use the Avios from the family member with the lowest balance.
I keep my Avios in BA, because BA offers a lot more options to extend expiration dates.
Transferring Avios out and then back to Qatar resets the expiration date. I don’t need any more options than that.
I read somewhere that transfers from other Avios programs to QR don’t reset expiration. Is that information incorrect?
You can only transfer to QR from BA.
I know I transferred all of my (xx,xxx) points from BA to QR in April 2025, and my Avios expiration is listed as April 2028.
I had 10 points in my BA account and transferred them to QR today and it didn’t reset my expiration. So then I transferred all of my Avios from QR to BA, and then back to QR so that for a brief moment I had a zero balance in my QR account. That reset the expiration to Sept 2028.
I once read (+5 years ago) that there was an issue with Iberia accounts where BA would let you transfer into an IB account that had no activity for 3+ years, so when you transfered Avios from BA to IB, IB would check if you had activity in the past 3 years, see none, and immediately expire the points that were just transferred in. I don’t know if that is still an issue. I never assume anything with Iberia.