Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
God Save the Points broke the story this morning that British Airways Executive Club today announced a new way to book British Airways award tickets. The short of the story is members now have an option to pay significantly more Avios, but the amount of money you’ll pay in surcharges has decreased by a heftier chunk. The key note here is that this isn’t an actual award chart change but rather a new payment option — you can still book awards for fewer Avios and the same old exorbitant surcharges if you prefer, Executive Club has merely added an option to pay differently (and I expect that most readers will prefer it). That’s key because it means that no, this pay-less-in-surcharges deal will not be reflected when booking with AA miles or Alaska miles, etc bur rather only when booking through British Airways. The new options are in most cases still overpriced compared to the best deals to/from Europe, but if you have a bunch of Avios or hit a big transfer bonus, this will make using your Avios to fly on British Airways far more appealing.
A new booking option: More Avios, Less Money
Rather than being an award chart change per se, this is merely another way to pay for your ticket. One Mile at a Time does a great delve into the new pricing option and while I’ll summarize the key ideas in this post, their post is worth a read.
Essentially, British Airways offers different options to mix Avios and cash to pay for an award ticket and they now have a “Reward Savers” concept available. For instance, the award chart holds that a business class award from New York to London should cost 50,000 Avios off-peak. Surcharges would ordinarily be $950. Now, on an off-peak date, you’ll see the option to instead pay 80,000 Avios and $350.
As you can see, the old option to pay 50,000 Avios and $950 is still there under “More pricing options”, but you can instead elect to pay 80,000 Avios and $350 one-way. While that’s till not nearly the best deal for business class to Europe, it is a significantly better deal for anyone who is Avios-rich.
To put that in perspective, compared to the previous award pricing, you’re paying an additional 30,000 Avios to save $600 in cash — a value of around 2 cents per Avios (is the singular an Avio? I digress). From that perspective, this is pretty clearly a decent deal.
On the other hand, 80K and $350 is on the expensive end for an award ticket to/from Europe. If you really want to fly nonstop and/or love British Airways, this could be a good option to have. On the flip side, if you wanted to fly from New York to London, you would likely have cheaper options in business class. Instead of paying 80K + $350, if United had saver availability, you could book Newark (EWR) to London via Turkish Miles & Smiles for far less at just 45,000 miles and $5.60 one way.
Still, considering the fact that British Airways is including taxes and fees in the cash copay, this new booking option could be more appealing for itineraries departing the UK, where you’ll get hit with the UK air passenger duty whichever program you use. For instance, a flight in the opposite direction (London to New York) on United via Turkish comes with about $311 in taxes and fees, which is actually more than British Airways would charge for their flights with this new booking option if you’re booking one-way departing London. Of course, you’ll still be paying 80K Avios off-peak, which is steep.
I believe this new pricing option does not apply to first class awards but rather only to economy, premium economy, and business class. For example, here’s a first class award from New York to London during off-peak dates. As you can see, it costs 68,000 Avios and $879.80.
Further, One Mile at a Time notes that this new booking option is open to anyone with Avios activity in the last 12 months. I don’t know if that means the 12 months preceding today specifically, but I imagine that someone who transferred the minimum number of Avois to British Airways would likely see the new pricing option.
What I don’t yet know for sure but I do find intriguing is whether you can book the “new” pricing (i.e. 80K and $350 on an off-peak date) and upgrade to first without paying a significant difference in the cash surcharges. If that’s possible, this may be more interesting.
Keep in mind that this new pricing option is also available on lots of other routes, not only on British Airways flights.
Finding British Airways award space
If you’re trying to find British Airways award availability, keep in mind that the best / fastest tool for that specific purpose is by far SeatSpy. You can see an entire year of availability in both directions at a glance.
When I began looking for award availability for this post, SeatSpy was my first stop — it made it very easy to find some availability.
I will note that today I noticed some of the dates that appeared available via SeatSpy were not available at British Airways, but I’d chalk that up to the fact that a lot of people have probably been booking awards today thanks to this new option. I’ve previously found it to be pretty reliable for British Airways space. Read more about SeatSpy here: SeatSpy: A tool for finding non-stop awards. Why is that useful?.
Bottom line
Personally, I’m not wildly enthusiastic about this change since most British Airways awards become overpriced in terms of miles required and don’t drop enough in surcharges to make me want to book them. That said, there certainly may be markets abroad where this will make them competitive — and particularly if you hit a transfer bonus, this could make British Airways awards far more interesting than they previously were.
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[…] British Airways will let you use Avios to pay the taxes, fees, and fuel surcharge portion of award tickets. – Yes, you can pay a large portion of taxes / fees / fuel surcharges with British Airways Avios (link). […]
However you’d have to fight TK’s booking process, while BA’s agents are competent and rival big US3’s. Also for most other *A carriers, you’d still be on hook for surcharge.
More options are always good.
Well, for what it’s worth, the screen shot in the post is from Turkish’s website showing that you could book that UA flight from EWR-LHR. United has had pretty good availability lately in business class between the US and Europe and you can book that online with Turkish with a few clicks of the mouse.
Now if there’s a schedule change / flight cancellation, then you’d probably be in for a not fun time.
I used the Turkish example as an apples-to-apples comparison to show that you could get to London nonstop for far less. If you want Star Alliance without surcharges, you could book any Star Alliance carrier to Europe for (at most) 63K LifeMiles without surcharges, some for 60K via Aeroplan (also no surcharges), Air France / KLM awards would cost you less in surcharges and also probably 25K fewer miles, etc. Options to Europe that are better than 80K and $350 abound.
I just got 150k avios this week and wanted to book a business class trip to Tokyo which was at 150K and £600 last week. Now my options are way worst: 1) use 200k avios and £550 or 2) 150k avios and £770. I’m really annoyed. I’m not sure if I didn’t check properly but pretty sure the “old avios option” is not available anymore as it costs me £170 more now with same amount of avios. Or maybe this is not applicable to London-Tokyo, might be beneficial for US routes.
It seems the change makes the value proposition on the BA card different and much better. It makes the Travel Together ticket more valuable considering the reduction in fees along with the $200 statement credit you get with the card.
Plus BA just flies from so many cities that most people will live within a reasonable proximity or be able to position fairly easily. Overall a real good change. COME ON YOU SPURS!!!
COYS!
Something similar to this has been available to me for quite a while. Don’t know if it’s because I’m BA Gold or what.
High number of points? Not compared to Delta. Ha.
The thing is: few people ever use Avios when the taxes are stupid-high, so those flights were never in the ‘equal comparison’ box in the first place. For those of us for whom those high-tax flights were treated as though they didn’t exist anyway, this is a devaluation plain and simple if the flights we do use Avios for, such as AA domestic (US) also now require more Avios.
A few blogs out there are trying to spin this as unambiguous good news. To me, this is a shot to their credibility.
This news has nothing to do with AA domestic redemptions to my knowledge.
Don’t you have to email ticket offices to use Turkish miles?
Still way overpriced. Though I use Avios fairly often, I haven’t flown BA for a decade now. Horrible deal turns into very bad deal.
Well, it’s at least an option and does value Avios higher than 1 cent a point. It could be useful in very specific situations where you have to fly on a certain date since BA does tend to have most award space from my home airport.