Flying Transatlantic for cheap using British Airways Avios

While living in the UK for three years, I was able to fly a lot on British Airways and collected a good amount of Avios, their frequent flyer currency. The British flag carrier is part of the Oneworld alliance and offers the possibility to redeem miles for travel on other members of the alliance. I have personally flown Air Berlin, American Airlines, Cathay Pacific and US Airways using Avios. It offers you great opportunities to fly around the world thanks to this partnership.

British Airways Campaign during the 2012 Olympics

British Airways and Oneworld alliance

Last November, I had to go home for a family reunion as my super grandmother was celebrating her 90th birthday! The timing was perfect as I already had a ticket back to Europe for business reasons. However, the trick now was to get back to New York. One-way transatlantic tickets are fairly expensive as the taxes make the price skyrocket pretty quickly. One option is to use low cost or reasonable priced carriers like Norwegian or Icelandair for one-ways. Another option is to use miles. Of course that is my favorite way as you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Avoiding taxes when redeeming Avios on transatlantic flights

British Airways tends to charge huge fees when redeeming fights on its own metal, especially out of London. In most cases, that would end up not being worth it to redeem flights. Below is an example when flying one way from London to New York and the taxes come to £240 which is nearly $400. This price would be the same one-way on Icelandair or Norwegian., definitely not worth using miles.

The two main carriers that don't charge huge taxes on Avios redemptions are Air Berlin and Aer Lingus. For the purpose of my trip in November 2013 I decided to use Air Berlin and you can see below that the taxes are much lower for the same amount of Avios, ie. 20,000 and 40,000 in Business class, but saving nearly $300 in taxes! The Iberia award flight also returned by the search would be priced at 24.500 Avios since British Airways is pricing each leg of the itinerary separately, taxes would be a bit higher too since transiting via Madrid.

An interesting option is also to pay with less Avios and add cash in case your Avios balance is a bit short for a particular redemption:

 

I happened to use some of my Flying Blue frequent flyer miles for my positioning flight from Toulouse in the South of France to Berlin for 10,000 miles with a layover in Amsterdam. So my final itinerary looked like this and ended up costing about $150 in taxes for my British Airways and Avios redemptions.

To conclude here are a couple of useful advice when booking any flight using miles:

• Beware of taxes imposed on award tickets, they can sometimes totally jeopardize the use of miles. One way to avoid that is to know which partners that won't charge too much fees on award flight redemptions.
• Be flexible on your schedule and on your destination. Especially in Europe, low-cost carriers like Easy Jet or Ryanair offer cheap ways to book positioning flights.
• Do your research and start by following travel other bloggers. Here are two of my favorite blogs on the subject: Head For Points in the UK and One Mile at a Time in the US.

Hope you enjoyed reading and that it wasn't too technical.