If you love travelling and want to fly to some exciting destinations, then one of the things you can do to help you financially meet your travel goals is to sign up to an airline reward scheme and commit to using that airline above others. We chose to join The British Airways Club and make the most of the different strands of that scheme, one of which is using a BA Amex credit card with the aim of qualifying for Amex companion vouchers.
The Amex companion voucher is a 2-for-1 flight voucher you earn by spending £15,000 in a year on a British Airways American Express card. You redeem it with Avios on a BA, Iberia or Aer Lingus Reward Flight booked through ba.com, pay the taxes and charges for both seats, and the second seat costs no Avios at all.
The free card’s voucher works in economy and lasts a year; the Premium Plus card’s voucher works in any cabin and lasts two. Book nine to twelve months ahead, because the seats go.
*Last checked: September 2026. The spend threshold, the fee and the validity periods were verified against the Avios and American Express pages in that month. They change; if you are reading this later, check them. This blog is part of our Reward Schemes hub.
As mentioned in my guide to The British Airways Club, the BA Amex card is one of the credit cards (there are many) that pay Avios on your purchases. There are two versions:
No annual fee. Pays 1 Avios per £1.
An annual fee, currently £300. Pays a higher rate of Avios per £1, and its companion voucher is more flexible, as explained below. The Premium Plus earn rate changes on 7 October 2026, so check the current rate before you weigh the fee against it.
Both cards usually come with a sign-up bonus of Avios for spending a set amount in the first months, and the Premium Plus card includes travel insurance, which for a family that travels a few times a year is worth setting against the fee. The bonus and the insurance terms change, so check the card page rather than anything written here.
You need to weigh up whether the benefits of the Premium Plus card outweigh the cost of its annual fee, depending on your requirements and personal circumstances. For us, the deciding factor was not the earn rate. It was what the voucher can be used on.
*This is not financial advice. A credit card charges interest and fees, and the whole strategy only works if you clear the balance in full every month. If that is not you, skip the card and collect Avios on flights and shopping instead.*
One of the benefits of committing to the BA Amex card is that, if you spend £15,000 in a card year, you are issued with a companion voucher which allows two people to fly for the price of one on a Reward Flight. It is added to your British Airways Club account shortly after you meet the qualifying spend; ours has arrived within a day or two.
Only one voucher is issued per card per year, even if you spend double the qualifying amount.
If you sign up for a BA Amex card and are eligible for a second card on the account, then you and your partner can save Avios in tandem, with any Avios earned on the second card going into the main account holder’s pot. That does not earn a second voucher.
If you and your partner each hold your own BA Amex card, and you both meet the qualifying spend, you can each earn a voucher. Whether you want to do that will depend on your income and how much you want, or are able, to put through a credit card, rather than onto it. Two cards, two vouchers, is how four of us flew to Dallas, which I come to below.
A companion voucher is redeemed alongside Avios, so this is where your pot of accumulated Avios comes in. The mechanics are simple once you have seen them:
You book a Reward Flight, paying the Avios for one seat.
The voucher covers the Avios for the second seat.
You pay the taxes, fees and carrier charges in cash for both seats. Those always have to be paid, however you pay for the flights.
The voucher works on Reward Flights on British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus, booked through ba.com, and the cardholder has to be one of the two people travelling. It is for Reward Flights paid in Avios; it does not apply to a cash fare part-paid with Avios.
The voucher halves the Avios, not the cash charges, so you still need the full Avios price for one seat. As a rough guide from our own bookings, around 120,000 Avios and a voucher gets two of you to the east coast of America and back in premium economy, and for long haul business class you want to be nearer 200,000. Two return business seats to New York priced at 176,000 Avios with a voucher in a search we ran for March 2027.
We recently bought two business class flights from London Heathrow to Santiago, Chile, with Iberia (a BA partner airline) for a total of £800: one companion voucher plus 130,000 Avios, and a payment of £400 each for the taxes. That trip became our Chilean Lake District road trip.
You can use a maximum of two companion vouchers on one booking, and they have to be the same type. Two Premium Plus vouchers can share a booking; a free card voucher and a Premium Plus voucher cannot.
If you want to redeem your 2-for-1 voucher when you are travelling alone, you can. Instead of a second seat, you get a 50% discount on the Avios needed for your own booking, and you pay the taxes for one person. You cannot add a second voucher to a solo booking.
The type of BA Amex card you have dictates which cabins you can book with the voucher:
The free card: Economy only, which means Euro Traveller on short haul and World Traveller on long haul.
Premium Plus: Any cabin, including Club World and First, as long as both seats are in the same cabin on the same flights. Premium Plus vouchers also get access to extra Club World reward seats that the free card's voucher does not.
There are a restricted number of flights and seats on which you can redeem a companion voucher, so you need to be organised and ready to book early, ideally when the flights are released, which is around 355 days before departure. In practice that means nine to twelve months out. What the voucher looks like on the booking screens, with a New York business class example, is in our reward flights booking walkthrough.
If the flights have not yet been released then it can be a bit of a military operation to redeem the voucher on return flights and get the exact flights you want, but it is worth it.
We wanted to fly to Las Vegas to celebrate a special wedding anniversary using a companion voucher and Avios. To make sure we did not miss out, we diary dated to book the flights exactly nine months before our travel date, when the outward Las Vegas flights became available.
We booked our outward flights, but then had to wait five days until the return flights became available, exactly nine months before the date of our return journey. BA customer services then added the two transactions together so that our 2-for-1 voucher could be applied to the whole journey.
You book the return online and apply for the voucher. If, as in the example above, you are trying to secure seats as they are released, it needs a two-stage booking and the BA helpdesk to join the two transactions together.
It is also worth knowing that there are usually more voucher seats on heavy traffic routes, such as London to New York, or to large hub airports such as London to Dallas. If you are planning to fly somewhere popular or off the beaten track, you may need to think of a more creative way to do it.
We planned to fly to Vancouver for a road trip around the Pacific Northwest but there were no companion voucher seats available at the time of booking, so we had a quick rethink and used our vouchers to fly to Seattle instead, reworking our itinerary from there. Tick!
If you want to use two vouchers on one trip, and both were earned on the same BA Amex card, you should be able to do it yourself through the BA website.
If the two vouchers were earned on two different BA Amex cards, yours and your partner’s, you will need to call the BA customer service helpline. They make two separate bookings, one for each voucher, and then join them together.
This happened to us when we tried to use two companion vouchers, earned on different BA Amex cards, to fly four of us from London to Dallas return. We tried and failed to make the bookings ourselves online, so we called BA customer services, who made two separate bookings for us and then joined them together so that we could check in as a family and sit together on the plane.
Both cardholders had to be on the call to the helpline to allow this to happen.
It is important to know when your voucher expires, and that depends on which card earned it:
The free card: The voucher is valid for 12 months.
Premium Plus: The voucher is valid for 24 months.
The rule to understand is that your outbound flight has to depart before the voucher expires. The return can fall after the expiry date, as long as it is booked before you fly out and is within twelve months of the outbound. So a voucher expiring in June does not mean your whole holiday has to be over by June; it means you have to have left by then.
Sometimes what you sign up for at the start changes, and may become less advantageous to you. So always consider any changes to the terms and conditions and work out whether this is still a good idea for you. The Premium Plus earn rate change in October 2026 is a live example, which is why this page carries a “last checked” date and why we recheck the card pages when we update it.
Similarly, life changes, and a card that suited you last year may not suit you now. Either way, make good use of the system whilst it works for you, and move on if it ceases to.
The 2-for-1 companion vouchers are like travel gold dust and can open doors to far flung places and dream destinations. As mentioned above, you do need to be organised to redeem them effectively, but it is worth a little planning in advance.
We have definitely travelled more often, and further afield as a family, by making the most of The British Airways Club and the Amex companion vouchers. Sometimes the vouchers have not got us to exactly where we wanted to go, but our travel Wishlist is long, and we have quickly adapted our plans around what was available with the vouchers.
It is all part of the fun of planning amazing travel adventures.
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