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Last month we covered the news that BA is planning to change the Avios pricing for partner awards from 30th May 2019 (i.e. tomorrow!).

British Airways still hasn’t released much official information about what the changes will entail, but it has been possible to piece things together thanks to information gleaned from call centre agents.

Blog Seat31B established the following:

• Per-leg pricing isn’t changing. Every flight is priced individually so the price for connecting itineraries is sum of all of the flights. This is the same practice as currently

• All partner flights will cost the same. It won’t be more expensive to redeem on Alaska or American versus Sri Lankan, S7 or Cathay Pacific.

• Taxes and fees won’t change. They will remain exactly the same as they are now.

• Pricing for business and first class is consistent. This will still be 2x and 4x the economy class price, respectively.

• It seems possible that the 0-650 mile award chart is coming back for flights within North America, because short-haul flights are pricing out based on this mileage band.

New partner award chart

Gary over at VFTW put together this nice simple chart for Economy redemptions, based on the info Seat31B was given:

Remember that pricing for Business and First Class is reported to be consistent at 2x and 4x the Economy price, respectively.

As you can see, the apparent increases for the shortest distances are quite substantial, while the changes to mid range distances are more reasonable.

Bottom line

If you were planning to make a booking before the devaluation, don’t forget to do it today. Although the specific changes haven’t been confirmed by BA, it’s very very unlikely that award prices are going to be improved, so I wouldn’t recommend waiting.

Do note though that the current set of changes only relate to partner awards – not to flights on BA itself, or with IAG stablemates Iberia, Vueling and Aer Lingus.