Member Stories: How I used my Avios for BA reward seats to Argentina
We love to hear how people use their Avios points to travel, so when one of our Gold Reward Flight Finder members, Kate, got in touch to tell us all about one of her favourite BA reward seat trips to Argentina we had to share her story with you.
Using the RFF Worldwide Map Tool to choose our destination
I love the Map tool on Reward Flight Finder. It has saved my marriage on more than one occasion. He loves Dubai, and always wants to go there. But we’ve been there several times before and I like to see something new when I travel.
So, I suggest somewhere else. He says no. Neither will concede to the other. He sulks. I am steaming. Then I whip out my big gun, the Reward Flight Finder Worldwide Map Tool. On one page, this shows available destinations for given dates and the Avios needed. Hey presto! How about Brazil? or Barbados? or Kenya? There’s availability for those but not for Dubai (thank you RFF!). Suddenly we are not arguing, but seriously considering other options we had never thought of before.
That’s how we ended up having a truly fabulous 6 week holiday in Argentina and Uruguay.
Our annual strategy
We like being somewhere warm at Christmas. Each year in late December/early January we set many RFF alerts for the next December, using different dates & destinations. We don’t have kids, so we are not restricted to school holidays. British Airways releases seats 355 days ahead, so you can exactly calculate when seats are likely to arise.
In January 2019, I set alerts for Miami, Jamaica, Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok. Within a month, availability came up for both Bangkok & Buenos Aires, and since we had been twice to Thailand already, we chose Buenos Aires and booked immediately with British Airways Avios points.
We used a BA companion voucher to get two business seats and the trip cost us 175000 Avios and £1240. We first booked the outward journey and then when our return dates became available, we called BA to add this to our original booking (no fee). We refused to pay to select our seats (pure extortion) but as Bronze BA Executive Club members, we were able to choose good seats 7 days ahead.
The trip itself
The anticipation is part of the fun. We read books on Argentina and then emailed a dozen friends to see if they had friends in Buenos Aires. And they did! We got the names of 5 locals to connect with.
The day arrived and at Heathrow, we checked out 3 different lounges. A little-known perk of flying Business on BA means you can use any of the lounges run by One World Partners. So we tried BA’s business lounge and that of Qantas and Cathay Pacific in Terminal 3. Our seats were perfect, the crew were quite jokey, and the food was OK.
We loved Buenos Aires, so much so that we have booked for Christmas 2022, again using RFF alerts and a BA companion voucher.
Buenos Aires truly has everything. Elegant but faded colonial architecture, expansive green spaces, tons of history and tradition, passions for football, polo, museums (there are 160), and theatres (over 300), and a melting pot of cultures derived from waves of immigration from the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Middle East, Africa & Asia. You see these influences in everything — the architecture, the fashions, the music, and the food.
Food! The food is AMAZING. You can eat like a king. Huge tender melt-in-the-mouth steaks, with steakhouses almost on every corner. Pizza, pasta and wonderful homemade ice-creams from the Italians. The traditional mate and addictive alfajores — chocolate-covered double-deck cookies filled with caramel-like dulce de leche. Not to forget the fabulous Malbec wines. Steak, wine and ice cream — nothing more needed.
But, be prepared to see massive wealth & massive poverty side by side.
How I got the Avios bug
I am a chartered accountant so my life revolves around money and financial advice. Being a natural sceptic, I have always been wary of credit cards, store cards and any aggressive promotions selling me expensive financial products. So, when a friend boasted that she had secured 2 business class seats to Miami for about £800, simply by collecting loyalty points with British Airways, I was initially very sceptical, especially when she explained that she had used a credit card to help collect the points.
But, I was intrigued and looked into it. After all, I knew her to be a really smart cookie, a successful investment banker, no less. What I discovered was that it was entirely possible to collect enough British Airways Avios each year for at least one significant long-haul flight, paying only the taxes. If, in addition, I signed up for the BA American Express Premium Plus credit card, I could possibly earn a BA companion voucher (2 tickets for the Avios of one) so my partner could travel too.
A revelation. I did the figures & it got better. Not only could we fly business (never had before) but we could literally save thousands compared to the cash price. A no-brainer.
So started my British Airways Avios journey and for the last 11 years or so, my partner and I have been avid collectors, travelling long-haul business class every single year (except during Covid) to the US, Caribbean, Japan, South America, Dubai, Thailand and Singapore.
We make sure to each earn a companion voucher every year. We have a big spreadsheet where we record our Avios collection and usage, costs and savings, and pre-Covid we calculate that we have saved at least £55,000 on the cash price of the tickets, after deducting any credit card fees.
How we collect Avios
We collect mainly through everyday shopping using the Amex card. We use our British Airways American Express Premium Plus card to pay for EVERYTHING. All our personal expenses. All our business expenses. Even friends’ expenses so long as they pay us back! My partner and I run separate businesses and we ensure that as many business expenses as possible pass through the Amex card. In the early days, fewer places accepted Amex. Now, most do.
The magic is we are getting rewarded for spending that we would be doing anyway — so why not make the most of it?
We are religious about using the BA and Nectar shopping portals, to access great offers at thousands of well-known retailers (sometimes triple Avios).
We do buy BA tickets for cash within Europe as we prefer to save our Avios for long-haul trips, so we earn Avios and tier points that way. We also ensure that we collect on our car hire. We buy the maximum Avios allowed when BA does good promotions, at least 50% discount. In May 2020, they offered a 75% discount which each of us took full advantage of.
Our attitude is that every pound we spend should generate either British Airways Avios or Nectar points. For those new to this, Nectar and Avios are mutually convertible. Their programmes are complementary to different retailers, and we deliberately limit ourselves to only these programmes. That way we ensure a tight focus.
Our membership of Reward Flight Finder
The same girlfriend introduced me to Reward Flight Finder, a brilliant concept. It is a truism that it is easy to collect Avios but much harder to find the reward seats you want. So, having a very reasonably priced alert service such as RFF find the seats for you is a real help.
Before I became a member of RFF many years ago, I would be searching many times per day for my dates & flights. It was very, very frustrating. It could take weeks to find seats to popular destinations like Miami or LA and sometimes I just gave up.
Now I am a Gold member paying £4.99 per month, and RFF has been brilliant at finding seats for me. I usually set at least 6 alerts for different destinations & departure dates. You can set up to 20 alerts and that is really the key. Set lots of alerts, do it months in advance and then sit back and let Reward Flight Finder do the work for you.
You do have to be flexible and if you want to travel at peak times, over Christmas, Easter or at half-terms, you absolutely must set the alerts 9–12 months ahead. Then you MUST move like lightning and book the seats the moment RFF notifies you.
That’s my story. Anyone can do this and it is absolutely worth it!
Original Source — https://rewardflightfinder.com/news-and-advice/member-stories-how-i-used-my-avios-for-ba-reward-seats-to-argentina
