Hi all! I’m a bit of a novice here so any advice are welcome. I managed to build about 45k of avois points in the past few years (my partner has less, about 20k). We are planning to buy to Japan from London in October - November for 2 weeks to celebrate his 40th. I don’t know if I should take advantage of the current flight sale and buy the flights around £530pp on economy, or I should do flat cash + avois, or just try to use the avois points somehow? Or should I wait until the summer and hope for some bonus avois redemption event? On a side note, I hadn’t had an amex card for 3 years. Had an email promo on 10k avois points if I create the BA AMEX card and spend £1k within 3 months (which can be easily done), or will I be better off applying for the amex gold (which I will struggle spending £3k in the first 3 months to get the 20k MR bonus? I don’t have any airport lounge tickets so the complimentary lounge entries from the Gold card can come in handy... thank you for reading this! And thank you for any input on this!
Hi Wing1 - welcome to InsideFlyer! Using Avios to Tokyo would require 39,000 or 60,000 per person return (depending on peak or offpeak dates) + taxes/fees of about £325 each. On that basis, even if you had sufficient Avios, your best case scenario (off peak for both the outbound and return) would mean you were only getting about 0.5p of value for each of your Avios, compared to the cash fare of ~£530. Part Pay with Avios (ie using Avios to pay an element off a normal cash fare) should get you slightly better value, but still far from great. Generally speaking, most people don't like to get less than 1p of value per Avios, so 0.5p definitely low - but everyone's circumstances are different. I would personally recommend saving your Avios for another time, when you can get better value from them. As regards the current cash fares, whether to pull the trigger really depends on how flexible you are. If you don't mind which airline you fly with and are happy to connect somewhere, you'll very likely be able to find cheaper fares at some point. But, if you want to fly direct with BA, £530 sounds ok.
Thank you for your response, that is very helpful! I think I will stick with BA to get the additional avois build up (also they are one of the few airlines that fly direct to Osaka and can do a multi city return trip with no additional fee). I think £530 is pretty good deal too for direct (I have seen China Eastern with indirect flights via Shanghai for £460 lately but I would definitely prefer a direct flight / decent sleep! Thank you.
Hello Wing1, We've put together a site " Seatspy.com" that monitors BA reward seat availability and sends you alert emails or text messages when new rewards are made available for the desired flights. It saves you from constantly checking the BA site for new availability. It also shows all reward seat availability for a year on one page making it easier to plan. It's in Beta at the moment and completely free, including the text alerts and email alerts. Check it out and let me know if it's useful, we would appreciate your feedback. Ghita,
Thanks - I bought my flights a few weeks ago so all is well as long as Coronavirus dies down in the summer!
Hey just read your thread, if you are looking for sasti flight tickets, then you must visit piaflight for best deals.
