I recently booked an award flight for only 7,500 points plus a $2.50 fee. To book this award, I used points from a program that any serious frequent flyer would agree is a must have program in your points and miles award booking arsenal.
The award I booked isn’t even the least expensive ticket (in term of points) I’ve booked with this program. It’s such a good airline loyalty program to accumulate points in that I would consider it a must have for any serious frequent flyer. The program is of course British Airway’s Executive Club program where you can accumulate Avios points and redeem them at ridiculous low levels for great domestic one-way and round-trip award flights on partner airlines.
Booking Last Minute Award For 7,500 Points
I recently booked a short American Airlines one-way domestic flight for only 7,500 Avios points. You can see how many points your desired flight would require by looking at the British Airways Avios calculator. Some one-way coach flights can price out as little as 4,500 points one-way with taxes and fees. 
British Airways Avios points are relatively easy to accumulate as well. For example, the current British Airways Visa Signature® Card offer provides 50,000 bonus Avios points after you make $1,000 in purchases within the first 3 months of account opening. That’s a lot of one-way flights. This card is being pulled from the affiliate network on Wednesday and will be relaunched early next week. It’s possible it could change or be a relatively minor change. I’ll pass along the information as soon as it is available.
Alternatively, I could have booked the exact same American Airlines flight using American AAdvantage miles. The regular price of the one-way award coach ticket on American Airlines is 12,500. But since I have the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® Visa Signature® Card, I would receive a 10% bonus back with the on my award booking (up to 10,000 miles per year) thereby making the award booking only 10,250 AAdvantage miles instead of 12,500 miles.
Avoiding American Airline’s $25 Phone Fee By Checking In Online
If you book your flight on American Airlines you can change your seat online for free instead of spending the $25 phone fee. Just call them and provide your flight number, name and date of travel. Then ask them to find your reservation and provide the 6 digit record locator. Once you have this record locator, you can go to AA.com to check-in online or change your seat.
Bottom Line
Any serious frequent flyer must give serious consideration to accumulating British Airways Avios Points. These points are an excellent tool in the short haul flight arsenal of points and miles.
What’s the best award redemption you’ve made with Avios Points.
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The Weekly Flyer writes about travel from a business traveler perspective. He travels the world every week accumulating points and miles along the way.
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For short haul it is great but for long haul it is terrible. Just helped a couple of friends book on BA metal business class to Europe for their honeymoon 130k avios each plus $1100 in taxes! A similar ticket booked on AA would have only been 100k miles. Unfortunately all they had were AMEX MR points and *A was bone dry for availability. It would be a better idea to accumulate Sapphire Preferred or AMEX MR points and only transfer to BA as necessary unless there is a huge promo with the BA card.
36000 RT to my family of 4 to Chicago for a trip to Wrigley Field. Last week booked our summer trip to Europe: flying BOS-DUB on EI for 100K Avios.
I did a few avios award booking searches for AA domestic flights a few months ago and there were often no avios eligible AA flights available on the days I wanted, and when there were it was usually 1 random difficult flight time on that day. Am I missing something?
Today my BA application for the 50k avios bonus was approved. Yay! I plan to use the points for a trip from Pdx to Hawaii next year: a great value at 12,500 points each way. Aloha!
I wrote a guide on “How To Book and Add Your AAdvantage # to a British Airways Avios Award Ticket”
I recently booked a domestic JL flight, NRT-ITM for 4500 Avios, oddly taxes were $0! It was trying to authorize a CC payment for $0, which wouldn’t go through (tried 4 cards). I ended up donating $1 to the BA backed charity and then it authorized.
Moral of the story? Sometimes taxes can be too low! 😉
I just checked B site – it says that taxes are on average $650 for overseas flight which is the same as other airline points…not $2.50