Avios - any good?

[stkf]

Has anybody used Avios air miles to book flights to Florida. I am trying to book flights for next summer with Avios (Glasgow to Orlando) but even using the airmiles the price of the taxes and surchages you have to pay is still working out at around £510 per flight. Is this normal?

 

[madmumof2]

I've not got enough for flights to Florida yet but they're fab for free travel insurance, hotels, activities etc

 

[amackay]

A better use of avios is booking seats in world traveller + and using points to upgrade to Club World.

 

[MichelinMan]

I am finding that my Avios aren't giving much of a discount on flights to Florida. BA are sticking large fuel surcharges onto the flights, even with using Avios points, which are making the cost of the flights with other taxes less attractive.

I will be using my Avios for car hire instead. I can get 3 weeks of car hire free for my Avios next year.

A little tip for people collecting Avios. Since BA bought BMI, you can convert BMI Destinations miles to Avios miles on a 1 to 1 basis. You can get a BMI credit card that gives you 20000 destinations miles when you first start using it, which you can then transfer to Avios. By comparison, the BA credit card only gives you 1000 Avios.

I more than doubled the amount of Avios I got by doing this recently.

 

[stkf]

Thanks for all the help. Will look at car hire and try Virgin miles plus money and see if I have better luck

 

[tinks86]

We used our avios to book car hire as well, it was via Avis and was quite a good way to use up our miles because like you it wasn't worth paying the taxes for the flights.

 

[Magic Megadegs]

Hiya we couldn't get flights with avios but used them to pay for our first six nights off site at Caribe Royale and a total of 7 nights / days over 2 bookings one way car hire xxx Good luck x

 

[WiganTony]

We have just used Avios to book our flights for next year. Economy flights from Heathrow to JFK (out with AA, return on BA) cost us £350pp in taxes and supplements on top of the 40,000 Avios miles. In comparison, our onward Business class flights from JFK to Los Angeles with AA cost us 25,000 Avios each way but £1.68 (not a misprint!!) in taxes, the flight being around an hour less than the Transatlantic leg.

One tip I would give you is to check both the BA Exec Club and Avios websites for flights. Allegedly they use the same allocation of seats, but for the date of our return flight from JFK to Heathrow, the Avios website is showing availability on all BA fligts, and with a good choice of Ecomomy, PE, Business and First. In comparison, the BA website is showing only two economy seats on the daytime flight and that's all

One advantage the BA website does have is that if no BA flights are available, you can then search for availability on partner airline (AA or Iberia) - this is how we got AA flights outbound, but as above, used the Avios website to book the return flight with BA.

Also an important point is that BA and Avios start releasing flights up to 350 days in advance, so keep checking on a daily basis for availability.

Good luck with getting a flight sorted.