Extra Club World Avios seats released, buy Avios bonus & BA redemption finder

BA release more Club World Avios redemption seats

If you have been struggling to find availability for Club World seats on Avios for the next few months it may be worth checking again. British Airways has released an additional 50,000 Club World reward seats for BA Executive Club members.

The extra seats are available from both  Gatwick and Heathrow from 16 December 2018 to 31 March 2019. The catch is that you must book by 2 December 2018 as they will disappear after this date. BA only guarantee to release 2 Club World seats at D-355 although they do often add more as time goes on.

The extra Avios Club World seats are available on the following routes:

London Gatwick:

Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Jose (Costa Rica), New York JFK and Mauritius.

London Heathrow:

Abuja, Accra, Amman, Atlanta, Austin, Bahrain, Baltimore, Bangalore, Beijing, Beirut, Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Calgary, Cape Town, Chicago, Dallas Fort-Worth, Denver, Dubai, Durban, Houston, Jeddah, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait, Lagos, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Miami, Montreal, Moscow, Nairobi, Nashville, New Orleans, New York JFK, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose California, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Seoul, Seychelles, Shanghai, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Tokyo Narita, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington.

You can find the official BA page with the full terms and conditions here.

BA redemption finder new feature

To help find availability BA redemption finder is very useful. BA redemption finder is an independent website which is potentially the most useful tool for getting Avios email alerts. It is also free for almost all functions. BA Redemption Finder is available as a website only. It will show a full 355 days of availability with one search. It is a fairly simple tool in that it won’t show connections or partner airlines  You can also only search one city pair at a time and you have to use the overall city code such as LON or NYC instead of the individual airports if there is more than one in a city.

The really great part of the site is the email alerts. You can set up alerts for free. Simply do a normal search on the site for the flights you want then fill in the form at the bottom to get email alerts for availability between a specified set of dates. A £3 a month Elite membership means that automated availability alerts are sent as often as once an hour, rather than one per day. This could be crucial on very popular routes, so it may be worth considering.

The website has just added a new feature as well which allows you to search for Avios availability for a particular date on every route. If you are struggling to find availability to use a 2-4-1 voucher, for example, this could be perfect if you are flexible on where you fly to. Just use the new “I don’t know where I want to go” on the home page. You can then specify the cabin, number of people and specific dates and it will show you all the availability for that date. The only drawback is that it is only available for elite members i.e. you must pay £3 a month to use this feature. Find out more on BA redemption finder here.

Buy Avios offer is back – up to 45% bonus

If you are planning on buying Avios and don’t need them urgently I would always advise waiting until there is a buy Avios offer as currently BA seem to running a promotion on buying Avios on a very regular basis. We have seen a 50% bonus before so you may wish to wait if you are not in a hurry.

The latest one offers a bonus of up to 45% when you buy Avios before 25 November 2018.

The bonus depends on how many Avios you want to buy. The bonus is as follows:

• 20% bonus when you purchase or gift 1,000 – 15,000 Avios
• 30% bonus when you purchase or gift 20,000 – 35,000 Avios
• 35% bonus when you purchase or gift 40,000 – 90,000 Avios
• 45% bonus when you purchase or gift 100,000 – 200,000 Avios

To buy the maximum of 200,000 Avios you would get 90,000 bonus miles giving you 290,000 for £3215. As usual, I won’t talk about how much an Avios is worth but look at what the Avios could buy you. We can look at what you could do with a 2-4-1 BA Amex voucher and what you could do for a straight redemption.

If you used a 2-4-1 voucher then for 190,000 Avios you could fly 2 people to Cape Town in First off-peak. 181,250 Avios (including the bonus) would cost £2015 to buy. If you were to buy these tickets they would usually cost around £4000 per person. If you used buy Avios then it would work out at £1607 per person including around £600pp in fees and taxes. The problem with this is that availability is scarce on the route so there is no guarantee you could use them. If we look at using the Avios without a voucher you could get 2 Club World flights to the US West Coast for 250,000 Avios off-peak. This would cost £2815 for 253,750 Avios.

You can find the Buy Avios page and the terms and conditions here.