Travel Reward Schemes and Air Miles Credit Cards Worth It?

Adamc

We are currently looking at booking a trip to Japan and the tickets for premium economy will cost around £2000 each for two of us. We have a choice of flying BA or other company. I have a back problem so would love to fly business sometime in the future. Are any of the air travel rewards-based credit cards worth considering for booking the trip? Would we accrue lots of airmiles for spending £4000 on flight and then continuing to use the card for all personal spending? I find travel reward schemes a little difficult to assess the worth of. 

jimi_man

Hi

There is a lot in this question so I'll tackle a few things.

Firstly, it depends how much you are going to use this card. The BA Premier Plus (I have one) costs £250 at the moment (going up soon) and if you spend £10,000 (soon to be £15000) in a year, then you get a Companion voucher - which is two people for one amount of Avios put simply. If you're unlikely to spend that amount that I'd say it's probably not worth it. We'll probably ditch ours after the next voucher as £15,000 is a little too much.

In terms of Avios you'd get approx 12,000 Avios for that fare (return). You'd also get (if you had the BAPP) 3 Avios for every £ spent - so another 12,000.

I went to Tokyo last year and with the current routing (Russia being shut) it's a long way - 14 hours or so. Personally I wouldn't do that in anything other than Business. If you were prepared to travel from Dublin then for around £2300 you can go in Business both ways (via Doha) on Qatar and/or JAL (arguably some of the better airlines out there.) If you wanted to go direct with BA then from Dublin via LHR it's around £2500.

The advantage of Qatar is that if you booked it through BA then with positioning flights to Dublin and another economy return during the year, you'd gain Silver status which might or might not mean anything to you. The major benefit is that you can use the lounges anytime you fly with BA or another Oneworld airline, irrespective of class of travel. 

Adamc

We're aiming to go during cherry blossoms so I don't think we'd get business for anything near that but will look into it. Just out of interest how did you find out about the saving by positioning and going via Dublin? Trial and error or is there a site with such info?


jimi_man said:

Hi

There is a lot in this question so I'll tackle a few things.

Firstly, it depends how much you are going to use this card. The BA Premier Plus (I have one) costs £250 at the moment (going up soon) and if you spend £10,000 (soon to be £15000) in a year, then you get a Companion voucher - which is two people for one amount of Avios put simply. If you're unlikely to spend that amount that I'd say it's probably not worth it. We'll probably ditch ours after the next voucher as £15,000 is a little too much.

In terms of Avios you'd get approx 12,000 Avios for that fare (return). You'd also get (if you had the BAPP) 3 Avios for every £ spent - so another 12,000.

I went to Tokyo last year and with the current routing (Russia being shut) it's a long way - 14 hours or so. Personally I wouldn't do that in anything other than Business. If you were prepared to travel from Dublin then for around £2300 you can go in Business both ways (via Doha) on Qatar and/or JAL (arguably some of the better airlines out there.) If you wanted to go direct with BA then from Dublin via LHR it's around £2500.

The advantage of Qatar is that if you booked it through BA then with positioning flights to Dublin and another economy return during the year, you'd gain Silver status which might or might not mean anything to you. The major benefit is that you can use the lounges anytime you fly with BA or another Oneworld airline, irrespective of class of travel. 

jimi_man

In April (15th to the 25th) 2025 which is cherry blossom time, it's around £2500 for a business (Club) return from DUB to HND and back (to DUB) on BA. A little less if you come back to Madrid and position from there. 

A return to Dublin on BA is £63 on those dates, maybe a little more if you take luggage - not sure if many people do these days. So £2600 each for the lot. A fair amount of money, sure, but if you're looking to dump £2k on some Premium Economy seats then I wouldn't bother and I'd spend another £600 and do that. With a bad back and 14 hours each way, then to me it's a no brainer. 

Travelling from Dublin is fairly well known to save a bit of money on fares. Not worth it on economy fares but on Business fares it saves a lot. I used Google flights to get a rough idea and then fine tuned it using ITA Matrix (which does have a slightly steep learning curve).

blindman

Adamc said:

We are currently looking at booking a trip to Japan and the tickets for premium economy will cost around £2000 each for two of us. We have a choice of flying BA or other company. I have a back problem so would love to fly business sometime in the future. Are any of the air travel rewards-based credit cards worth considering for booking the trip? Would we accrue lots of airmiles for spending £4000 on flight and then continuing to use the card for all personal spending? I find travel reward schemes a little difficult to assess the worth of. 

We have a choice of flying BA or other company.: BA in business is not the best look at other airlines IMHO
Would we accrue lots of airmiles for spending £4000 on flight  No
Are any of the air travel rewards-based credit cards worth considering for booking the trip? :- Possibly but then you are into the AVIOS game which can be a dark art at getting best value!

Saves money if you start EX UK (Dublin or AMs ) however it's not a newbies game IMHO

My opinion:
UNless you want to get into the AVIOS game-for the long term future flights with all it's Pros and Cons, I pay a cash fare with a cashback card with an airline who treats you FAR better than BA in business.

Headforpoints.com is a good web-site to get further knowledge.

Voyager2002

A possible alternative: break your journey. You can get to the Middle East/Gulf in about six hours, get a room for the night and then the rest of the journey would be about a day. If you fly economy on Etihad they provide a free hotel room, but otherwise you are only looking at around thirty-odd pounds. I did that last year and it made such a difference, particularly the opportunity to swim in the hotel pool after the flight.

Ballard

I used the BA Amex Premium Plus card for a number of years but have downgraded it I the standard Amex this year as the higher fee and £15,000 spend requirements have made it unappealing. I’ve switched to the BA Barclaycard instead. I have the free version which suits me for now.

i spend around £1,000-1,200 a month and earn one Avios per pound. I also use the BA shop on some spending, although it’s worth checking the price outside of this scheme too as it can be cheaper that way. 

The other thing that I do, and this is incredibly dull, is to complete surveys through e-rewards & Aviosforthoughts. I get around 3,000 Avios a month between these two sites. 

For redemptions I had a trip to Uruguay, returning from Argentina last year for about 80,000 Avios and £500. Next year I’m going to Peru and have two tickets for 120,000 Avios and around £950. Both of these were with the Amex 2-1 voucher in business (although I used the half price option in the first trip). These flights are through Iberia. 

Voyager2002

Ballard said:

I used the BA Amex Premium Plus card for a number of years but have downgraded it I the standard Amex this year as the higher fee and £15,000 spend requirements have made it unappealing. I’ve switched to the BA Barclaycard instead. I have the free version which suits me for now.

i spend around £1,000-1,200 a month and earn one Avios per pound. I also use the BA shop on some spending, although it’s worth checking the price outside of this scheme too as it can be cheaper that way. 

The other thing that I do, and this is incredibly dull, is to complete surveys through e-rewards & Aviosforthoughts. I get around 3,000 Avios a month between these two sites. 

For redemptions I had a trip to Uruguay, returning from Argentina last year for about 80,000 Avios and £500. Next year I’m going to Peru and have two tickets for 120,000 Avios and around £950. Both of these were with the Amex 2-1 voucher in business (although I used the half price option in the first trip). These flights are through Iberia. 

Thank you, that sounds great.

Could you please provide a link or simple instructions on how to use Avios with Iberia? I can only see how to 'redeem' them with BA.

Ballard

You can look to book in the same way as with BA but it suggests partner airlines. I think that it allows Qatar through too (although I don’t think that it can be used with an Amex 2-for-1 voucher).

I rang them with last years trip (into Montevideo, return Buenos Aires) as it’s not possible to book open jaw reward tickets online as far as I’m aware. 

If you test a booking to somewhere like Bogata you’d see whether Iberia show up as BA don’t fly there. 

jimi_man

Voyager2002 said:

Ballard said:

I used the BA Amex Premium Plus card for a number of years but have downgraded it I the standard Amex this year as the higher fee and £15,000 spend requirements have made it unappealing. I’ve switched to the BA Barclaycard instead. I have the free version which suits me for now.

i spend around £1,000-1,200 a month and earn one Avios per pound. I also use the BA shop on some spending, although it’s worth checking the price outside of this scheme too as it can be cheaper that way. 

The other thing that I do, and this is incredibly dull, is to complete surveys through e-rewards & Aviosforthoughts. I get around 3,000 Avios a month between these two sites. 

For redemptions I had a trip to Uruguay, returning from Argentina last year for about 80,000 Avios and £500. Next year I’m going to Peru and have two tickets for 120,000 Avios and around £950. Both of these were with the Amex 2-1 voucher in business (although I used the half price option in the first trip). These flights are through Iberia. 

Thank you, that sounds great.

Could you please provide a link or simple instructions on how to use Avios with Iberia? I can only see how to 'redeem' them with BA.

Hi

You do them exactly the same way as you would with BA. For example, log in to BA with your Exec Club then go to Book Reward flights with Avios (scroll down a bit). Select a flight - in this case try MAD to JFK and after asking if you want stopovers it will then come up with the Iberia direct option first, followed by the AA option (also direct) and then the (numerous) via LHR options with a mixture of Iberia and BA.

You can do this with pretty much all of the Oneworld partners. 

Incidentally the route from MAD to JFK is extremely good value. I presume you'd want to book Business as Economy Avios redemptions are stunningly poor value. The Iberia flight is 34,000 each way - so 68k plus £211 cash. The AA version is 124k and £1000 and the BA (via LHR) is 200k plus £400. It's Iberia's Zone 5 which covers 3-4000 mile journeys which is the sweet spot. 

Iberia accept the Amex 2 for 1 voucher as well. 

Finnair also have some reasonable Reward fares to Asia too, all bookable on ba.com. 

DullGreyGuy

Adamc said:

We are currently looking at booking a trip to Japan and the tickets for premium economy will cost around £2000 each for two of us. We have a choice of flying BA or other company. I have a back problem so would love to fly business sometime in the future. Are any of the air travel rewards-based credit cards worth considering for booking the trip? Would we accrue lots of airmiles for spending £4000 on flight and then continuing to use the card for all personal spending? I find travel reward schemes a little difficult to assess the worth of. 

Depends on what your personal spending is and where. Spending a couple of hundred pounds a month here and there will not get your many miles when you consider long haul flights can be 100,000 miles plus per person. You can improve your situation by putting all the spending you can on the card and making use of promotions etc. 

Assessing worth is complex, the classic way is to see the difference in cash value and dividing that by the number of miles spent to get a per mile value of the saving. Most set a target, has to be at least 0.75p per mile else it's not worth doing it. Personally I dont think this fully works, the best deal I got was on a First class ticket with Cathay Pacific which got me a nearly £10,000 ticket for $5 but there is no way on this planet I'd have paid for First with my own cash so can I really claim a near £9,995 saving? I would have sprung for a Premium ticket if it was my own money but the lounge access, the free flowing vintage Krug champagne etc did add some value so I can't use the cost of that ticket as the basis either.