Some links to products and partners on this website will earn an affiliate commission.
Many people simply do not stay enough in hotels to obtain the value from accumulating points and status benefits from a hotel chain. You might also prefer independent hotels to the major chains. As a result, your main focus might be to simply earn as many Avios as possible when you occasionally require a hotel.
Athough it’s not particularly well-known, you can easily earn 15 Avios per £ by booking your hotels via avios.com. Despite rumours of its demise, Avios.com is still going strong, as long as you’ve signed up to Vueling Club or Aer Lingus AerClub.
Once you’ve earned your Avios in AerClub, you can easily Combine Your Avios to send them over to British Airways Executive Club or Iberia Plus.
Are the Room Rates Competitive?
The first thing that might concern you is whether hotel rates are higher on Avios.com than they would be by booking direct or with a different online travel agency. At first glance, rates appear to be competitive. I even randomly stumbled across a deal…
This situation almost certainly will not apply across the board, but it does help illustrate that Avios.com might not be marking up to the extent that Rocketmiles or Pointshound do…
Will I Earn Points or Elite Status Credit?
No. You would be booking through a third-party online travel agent. So you won’t earn any points or credit for elite status purposes.
What About Booking Conditions?
Avios.com – or more appropriately its wholesaler – lets itself down with its cancellation policy.
In my opinion, there are NO CIRCUMSTANCES where it is appropriate to charge a £35 administration fee to cancel a flexible hotel booking… NONE!
But if you are booking a prepaid rate, this administration fee won’t matter.
Are There Better Ways of Earning Avios via Hotel Stays?
There are certainly the occasional promotions from the likes of Kaligo, Pointshound, Rocketmiles, etc. that might be available at any given time.
But the simplest way to earn Avios from hotel ways might well be Topcashback. It can be rather exhausting to track the ups-and-downs of the cashback payouts from a variety of accommodation providers. But if you accumulate cashback from the likes of Expedia or Booking.com and then convert it to Avios during a 25% bonus promotion – such as the one currently running (click here) – you can easily approximate the 15 Avios per £. And if you happen to snag a high cashback rate from the likes of Marriott or IHG, you WILL earn points and elite status credit.
Have you ever used Avios.com to book a hotel stay? Did you even know that the option existed?
As you say in the article there is a wholesaler used. Does it increase the risk of being walked? This happened to me with a Kaligo booking for myself last year. I wasn’t too worried on that occasion but I wouldn’t want it to happen with a family holiday booking, tempting as 15 Avios per pound might be. I know there are ways of reducing the risk of being walked such as arriving early and/or having a multi night booking but I wonder how prevalent the problem is given that I’m not really a high user, spending probably no more than about 40 nights a year in hotels, and not even having heard of being walked until it happened to me!
When you book through OTAs you are definitely at the bottom of the food chain. When it comes to “walking”, any decent hotel is going to try to protect those who booked direct and/or regular customers. A chain hotel is going to try to hold on to rooms for any arriving guests with elite status.
That said, I’m not sure that hotel over-booking is all that prevalent. Your prior experience might have just been bad luck.
iberia’s avios hotel bookings use expedia as the underlying booking agent, or that was certainly the case a year ago when I used my 90K avios for hotel bookings.
Iberia is a real piece of work for avios hotel bookings. when the booking is complete, you MUST download the hotel vouchers there and then from the confirmation webpage. Gawd help you if you lose your internet connection at the wrong point. You get no email offering the vouchers, and there is no online access to iberia avios bookings. I tried about 2-dozen times between phone 6+ different iberia numbers, twitter, facebook, avios UK etc, and ibera has NO access to the vouchers, and no one else does. I did have the iberia reference number, they could see the booking, but that was all. Thankfully, the hotel could also see the booking (it was them that told me there could see a booking from expedia), and did not demand the voucher, but other than that I was screwed.