One of the best music festivals in the world each year is the BPM Festival in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. The Sacbe party in the jungle was regarded by many as one of the best parties of the year. I just booked my flight there for $70 in business class. Here is how:
I took advantage of the 100,000 Mile British Airways offer last year and used some of those miles to go to Machu Picchu, Easter Island, and Santiago, Chile back in April. Since British Airways uses a distance based chart for their awards, short distances can be a huge value when redeeming miles. Here is their Avios redemption chart:
Since Cancun is only 531 miles in the air from Miami, that means that it is only 9000 miles round trip in economy or 18000 round trip in business class! I went onto the British Airways site and searched availability during the festival dates and found that seats were available in business class. Score!
This meant for 18,000 Avios miles and $70, I could go to BPM! I wanted to see what the value of these miles were so I priced out the exact same ticket on Kayak and came up with $739.
This gave me a redemption value of $739 / 18000 = $0.04 per Avios point, which I thought was a good value. Since it is only a 2 hour flight, I actually probably would have booked the economy for 9000 if it was available, but it wasn’t on the dates I needed.
Avios can be some of the best values for short haul flights around the world because many times the airlines gouge you on pricing. If you want to check how many Avios it requires to get to different city pairs, check out this nice “How Many Avios do I Need” page on BA’s site. Another useful tool is the GCMap.com where you can find out the distance between two cities or view a map of everything within a certain distance of a city. Here is a map of 650 miles from Miami.
So anywhere within that circle would be only 9000 Avios round trip in Economy! Since British Airways is a transfer partner of both Membership Rewards and Ultimate Rewards, that means you can also get Avios from your Chase Ink Bold or Chase Sapphire Preferred cards or your American Express Business Gold Rewards we have written about in the past.
British Airways miles can be very valuable if used correctly and if you don’t have some, you should get some so you can come travel with me! As always feel free to comment with any questions.