How many Avios do you need for a reward flight?

How many Avios do you need for a reward flight?

Figuring out how much your reward flight with British Airways will cost can be tough. BA doesn’t publish a reward flight chart or a calculator tool, so I figured I’d do it for them. Meet Avios Flight Calculator!

What it does today

The current version of the calculator is focused on British Airways reward flights. Here’s what it can do:

  • Calculates Avios + Cash: It shows how many Avios + cash you will need to book a reward ticket with BA given your departure and destination points.
  • Multiple Cabins: You can see pricing for Economy, Premium Economy, and Business Class.
  • Optimal Value: The tool shows the different Avios + cash cominations BA offers and highlights the one that provides the best value for Avios.
  • Voucher Support: It can factor in an Amex Companion Voucher or a Barclaycard Upgrade Voucher.
  • Connecting flights: You can see pricing for connecting flights, e.g. FRA -> LHR -> JFK. The prices for different segments are combined together to show you the correct total.

The Future Roadmap

There’re still quite a few features missing that I plan to add.

1. Peak vs. Off-Peak Pricing

Currently the tool shows off-peak pricing only. I’ll add a togggle (or better a date picker) to switch between off-peak and peak prices.

2. First Class Redemptions

The calculator doesn’t show pricing for First Class - yet! I’ll be adding this option shortly.

3. OneWorld and Partner Airline Redemptions

This is one is a little tough. But I think it’s essential to show partner redemption option at least on routes where BA’s pricing is clearly unreasonable and there’s a good OneWolrd alternative you can use instead.

4. Anything else?

There’re lots of things that can be done: adding non Avios airlines (e.g. Virgin and other Amex Membership Rewards transfer partners), tracking live availability (at least for some airlines). I’ll tackle the 3 things above first and we’ll see where it goes from there.

How you can help

A couple of things here:

  • If you spot any errors in pricing (or any other bugs) - let me know at hello@loyaltyllama.co.uk. Same goes for any improvement suggestions.
  • If you're interested in credit cards, reward points and travel - check out the Loyalty LLama channel on YouTube for a lot more content on this topic!