Until midnight on Monday, BA has a peculiar deal on flights and unlike most BA sales, there’s pretty much no restrictions.
The Low down
Whether you’re searching for a one-way flight or return. Economy, Premium Economy, Business or First Class. Or whether you’re wanting to fly tomorrow or next year it doesn’t matter, the deal is applicable to all British Airways flights (With the exception of flights departing from London City which aren’t included).
The discounts that are offered:
| One Way Flights | Return Flights |
| £5 off with 250 Avios | £5 off with 250 Avios |
| £9 off with 450 Avios | £18 off with 900 Avios |
| £16 off with 800 Avios | £32 off with 1,600 Avios |
| £28 off with 1,400 Avios | £56 off with 2,800 Avios |
| £40 off with 2,000 Avios | £80 off with 4,000 Avios |
| £50 off with 2,500 Avios | £100 off with 5,000 Avios |
The Catch
Inevitably there will always be a catch. As mentioned above, you can use this discount on BA City Flyer which depart from London City airport and also Southampton airport. You also can’t use any vouchers you may have. It’s a fairly effective way for BA to do a cash grab. There will no doubt be tens if not hundreds of thousands waiting to cash in their Future Travel Vouchers, so rather than take vouchers, remove that possibility for this deal and you’ll get cash only bookings.
Gaming The System
There’s a couple of ways to leverage this deal depending on what outcome you want:
Cheap Tier Points – Let’s say you’re wanting to get to the next status level within the British Airways Executive Club.
All of the above routes earn 80 Tier Points one way in Business Class. You could book something like London to Sofia, Bulgaria in Business Class return and by the time you’ve reduced the price by £100 with 5,000 Avios you’ll be paying £114 which is a great deal for 160 Tier points. Book 4 returns over the space of your tier point collection year and you’ll go from 0 status at all, all the way to Silver where you’ll get Business Class lounge access on all of your flights.
Cash in your Avios – Let’s say you have a decent balance of Avios and want to turn them into cash.
This isn’t the easiest one to figure out but… You could find a return set of flights where the base fare is just over £100 with the taxes and fees on top. An example to try and simplify it, Newcastle to London return comes in at £120, £101 for the base fare then £19 for the taxes and fees. You could then use 5,000 Avios to cover the first £100 of the base fare leaving you only £20 to pay in cash to cover the rest of the taxes and fees. You could then cancel said return flight for which you have spent £20 and 5,000 Avios and get a voucher worth £120. Given that you can use up to 4 vouchers on a single booking you could do this 4 times over. That means a new booking (say to Hong Kong which is usually £400~ in economy) with 4 vouchers could nock £400 off for just 20,000 Avios. To put that into perspective, Hong Kong usually costs 39,000 Avios plus about £360 of fees for an economy redemption!!!
Some complex processes to game the system so if you need help, just ask.