How to Book A Reward Flight With Avios
Book A Reward Flight With BA
Avios is the mileage currency used by the British Airways Executive Club, BA’s loyalty programme for frequent flyers. It’s free to set up an account on BA.com and you’ll then be able to earn points when you on British Airways or their partner airlines in the Oneworld® alliance, such as Iberia and American Airlines. You can also increase your points balance when you spend with a range of non-airline partners such as travel insurance providers, car rental companies and credit card providers.
However, what can you actually do with your points once you’ve earned them? The most obvious answer, and the best way to use your balance, is to book a reward flight with Avios. These “reward flights” are actually seats, which BA guarantees to offer, on each of its flights, for customers to purchase using their points balance. They release a few of these seats 355 days before the departure date. Subsequently, more of these seats become available, in the days up to departure, depending on how many paid tickets have been sold. (In the US these are sometimes referred to as “award seats”.)
Sadly, many people earn points but never get round to using them, often because they think it’s complicated or they haven’t got the time to keep checking availability. Certainly, there is no obvious “Book Avios Reward Flight” button on the BA website. However, with a few simple steps, you can quite easily discover and book flights with Avios.
BA.com has been recently redesigned and depending on which country you are in, you may see a different layout. However, in the UK and US the process now will be as follows:
- Go to https://britishairways.com
- Click the login button at the top right of the screen (On mobile devices you may need to click the three lines in a square first)
- Click the “My account details” link
- On the right-hand side, you should see a link that says “Book flights with Avios”
If you are on a mobile device you will see a link that says “Book”, click that then “Book a flight with Avios”.
You can also go to the “My Executive Club” page and from here you should quite easily be able to find the option to book a flight using your Avios balance.
If you have the latest version of the British Airways mobile app, you should see a “Reward Flights” option in the menu and from here you can search availability.
BA often experiments with the design of both its site and its app, but generally speaking, if you login and go to your Executive Club account, you will be able to find the links for redeeming your points, more easily than on the homepage.
One of the challenges with the British Airways website is that you can only see the reward flight availability at the time of your search. Furthermore, it can be hard to search across destinations and cabin classes. This is where you might find it easier to use a specialist reward flight site. If you search for “book Avios reward flight” on your preferred search engine, you will probably see a few options, however, we’d suggest you take a look at Rewardflightfinder.com. Reward Flight Finder lets you see availability across cabin classes for the full year in a single view. Better still, you can set up alerts, so if there is no availability yet, for the route you want to fly, just set your alert and get a message when new reward seats are released. Simple!
We hope you found this short guide helpful. Using your airline points is one of the easiest ways to reduce the cost of air travel. You may still have to pay some taxes and fees, but by taking a few simple steps, you can drastically reduce your cash outlay. British Airways, along with its partners, offers one of the largest international flight networks, making its frequent flyer scheme a particularly attractive proposition.
Wherever your next trip takes you, safe travels!
