Well, it’s the first of December which means my routine of transferring the maximum of 50,000 Avios from my BA Executive Club account to 80,000 Nectar points to spend at Sainsbury’s/Argos/eBay has reset. Would you look at that, what a lovely pleasant surprise. Gone is the 250 Avios conversion to 400 Nectar. You now have to transfer 300 Avios to get the same 400 Nectar points.
To put that into layman’s terms, 50,000 Avios converted to 80,000 Nectar points which equated to £400 to be spent at Argos, eBay or Sainsbury’s. To save you the math’s that’s 1 Avios = 0.8p.
Now when you transfer 50,100 Avios you get 66,800 Nectar Points which equates to £334 to spend. If you transferred the maximum every month (Which I did) you’re now losing out on £66. That means 1 Avios = 0.66p.
What Now?
The whole point of me transferring my, shall we say rather large, Avios balance to Nectar was because i was sick of having to pay for services to alert me when First Class seats would become available. Yes, you could just call up at Midnight/1AM 365 days in advance to hope you were the lucky one that managed to snag your seat when it was released. Even then there are no guarantees that BA would release any first-class tickets for redemption, and as that’s the only nice way to fly with BA it’s slim pickings. Add to that all of the ludicrous surcharges that they have massively inflated devaluing the Avios even more…
I won’t be transferring Avios to Nectar anymore. BA has achieved what it wanted (stopping the haemorrhaging of Avios to Nectar). Instead, I shall be saving my Avios for flights in America with American Airlines, Australia with Qantas and hopefully Hong Kong one day with Cathay Pacific. All offer incredible value and the latter 2 a great service. Hey you never know, BA might one day lower their surcharge on redemption bookings… (? not a chance)