If you have read our article on the ABC’s of Airline Alliances, then you know that you can earn or redeem miles on a different airline than you are flying or redeeming on. For example, you can earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles when you are flying British Airways and vice versa. Or you can redeem British Airways Avios for American flights (or any other OneWorld carrier). Today we will show you how to do that using the British Airways web site.
If you haven’t already read our Getting Started article and signed up for AwardWallet, you should now. In addition to having an awesome mobile app, one of the features when you are logged into your Awardwallet account on your computer is that they will automatically log you into almost all of your frequent flyer accounts. Since we are going to be using British Airways Avios today, you just click on the British Airways link from your award wallet to get transferred to the British Airways frequent flyer web page and logged in.
Once you are logged in to the British Airways site, choose Executive Club then Spending Avios from the top menu bar.
Then choose Book Flights with Avios from the menu bar on the left hand side of the page.
A box will then appear where you can put in your departure city, destination city and travel dates. For the purposes of this example I will search for Miami to Cancun over the dates of the BPM Festival.
When you click on Get Flights, the following will appear if seats are available on your dates. Note that American Flights are showing up for this route even though we are using British Airways miles.
When you have selected both of your flights, a summary will appear at the bottom telling you approximately how many miles and cash (for airport taxes) it will be. Hit Continue.
A final summary page will appear for your review before you enter the passenger information and payment method.
Select the checkbox that you agree to their terms and conditions and then click “Continue to Payment Page”
The rest of the process is pretty straightforward with you putting in the passenger information and then choosing a payment method for the taxes.
So there you have it! How to make an award booking on British Airways web site using Avios! In a future article we will show you how to decide when to use British Airways miles vs American vs some other miles. If you don’t have any Avios right now, you can get 40,000 Ultimate Reward points for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card since they can be transferred to British Airways. Or you can get 100,000 with the Chase British Airways card!
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