Over the years, selling points and miles has become one of the most profitable activities for loyalty programs, with Covid-19 only accelerating this trend. Cast your mind to various Frequent Flyer or Hotel Loyalty programs, chances are that most of them sell points and miles to their members regularly.

From the customer point of view, buying points objectively can bring about enormous savings. In the current environment of massively inflated airfares and hotel room rates, savvy points collectors can buy and redeem points for Business or First-Class flights for a fraction of the actual cost of the flight or have a luxurious stay at some of the most aspirational hotel brands in exotic locations where cash rates are so ridiculously high, only the uber wealthy could afford it.

Loyalty Programs are now taking selling points to the next level by launching subscription services. LifeMiles, which is the name of Avianca’s Frequent Flyer Program is somewhat of a front runner, and has been doing it for at least couple of years. We are now seeing British Airways Executive Club join the subscription bandwagon.

What are Avios

If you are not familiar, Avios is the name of the common Frequent Flyer currency of British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus, thanks to these airlines having a common owner in International Airlines Group or IAG. Just the way Qantas and Velocity Frequent Flyers earn and redeem Qantas and Velocity points, Frequent Flyers of these 3 airlines earn and redeem Avios.

Then last year, Qatar Airways made it a party-of-4 by adopting Avios as its Frequent Flyer currency.

Redeem Avios to fly Qatar Airways Qsuites

The Doha based carrier already owned about 25% stake in IAG, so the switch to Avios did not comer as a very big surprise. As things stand, travellers can earn and redeem Avios on all 4 airlines. That’s not all, it is also possible to transfer Avios back and forth between all 4 Frequent Flyer Accounts at 1:1, which is such a great feature.

Purchasing Avios Subscription

Last week, British Airways started selling Avios subscription. Under the service, members can earn a fixed number of Avios each month depending on the type of service they take-up. You can subscribe for monthly or annual subscriptions, with the latter offering greater value.

One thing to be aware of is that British Airways sell Avios in 3 different currencies, Great British Pound (£), Euro (Ç) and US$ and for some strange reason pricing isn’t uniform. What I mean by that is that British Airways Executive Club members based in UK and Europe pay considerably less for Avios than their counterparts in the United States.

Here is an example of the pricing for an annual subscription in GBP.

Price of Annual Avios Subscription in Great British Pound

As you can tell, if you take up the Annual Subscription for the Adventurer package, you can acquire 200,000 Avios for £1,789 which equates to a cost of just 0.0089 pence(p) per Avios. These will be credited to you in the form of 16,667 Avios deposited in your account each month for 12 months.

Here is the pricing in Euro and USD for the same annual subscription.

Price of Annual Avios Subscription in Euro

Price of Annual Avios Subscription in USD

The numbers speak for themselves, you get the best price when you pay for your Avios in Euro’s. In Australian dollar terms, this is how the pricing looks if you purchase the Adventurer package which comes with 200,000 Avios, under an annual subscription;

• You pay A$3,141 or 1.6c per Avios if you pay in Euro.
• You pay A$3,196 or 1.6c per Avios if you pay in GBP.
• You pay A$4,864 or 2.4c per Avios if you pay in USD.

How to Pay for Avios in Euro

If your Executive Club account has an Australian address, the purchase currency automatically defaults to USD, which, as we saw above has the worst pricing. So before you do anything else, make sure you have changed the country of your residence to one of the Euro zone countries.

To do this, login to your Executive Club account and navigate to Update your personal information as shown below;

Click on Update your personal information, and then on the next page you will be able to update your address. There is no need to enter an entirely new address, as long as you change the country to any 1 of the 19 EU countries whose official currency is Euro you will be ok.

In my case, I changed the country to Germany and that did the trick.

Once that is done, you will see that the subscription will be priced in Euro like you see below

Pay for your subscription in Euro to get the cheapest cost

Remember to pay with a card which does not have a Foreign Currency Transaction Fee, such as the Coles Rewards Mastercard or Latitude 28 Degrees Mastercard.

Is buying Avios worth it

British Airways is part of oneworld alliance, which means that apart from flights on its own metal you can also redeem Avios on other oneworld member airlines such as Qantas. British Airways operate a seasonal (but fixed price) award chart for redemption on its own flight. Flights during off-peak season are priced significantly cheaper than during peak season.

For redemption on partner airlines, British Airways operates a distance based redemption chart, not too dissimilar to Qantas. They no longer publish the chart, but pricing for partner awards is as per the table below;

So what does all this mean. It means that if you acquire Avios at the cost of 1.6c per Avios, this is what you will pay for the following flights:

• You can fly Qantas Business Class between Melbourne and Sydney for 12,500 Avios, which equates to a cost of $200.
  
  

• You can fly Qantas Business Class between Sydney and Darwin for 22,000 Avios, which equates to a cost of $352.
  
  

• You can fly Qantas Business Class between Perth and Broome for 16,500 Avios, which equates to a cost of $264.
  
  

• You can fly British Airways First Class (off-peak) between Sydney and Singapore for 68,000 Avios, which equates to a cost of $1,088.
  
  

• You can fly Qatar Airways Business Class between Australia and Doha for 70,000 Avios, which equates to a cost of $1,120.

Redeem Avios to fly Qantas Business Class

There will be fees and taxes on top of the prices quoted above, however, when you consider that cash prices for these flights are generally in several thousands of dollars (tens of thousands even), the value you are getting out of these redemptions is truly astounding 😲

In Conclusion

British Airways are now selling Avios subscription. While there is a large initial capital outlay and the Avios only come in monthly instalments, the value proposition is out of this world.

If you do take up the annual subscription, British Airways will renew it automatically at the anniversary. So do remember to cancel it if you don’t wish to go beyond the first year.

Do you wish to buy Avios Subscription? Leave a comment below.