A few years ago some friends of ours flew to Sydney in business class. They had paid for almost all of it with air miles and Amex companion tickets, and when they told us what it had cost them, we assumed they were joking. They were not. That conversation started a thirty-year habit of collecting points, learning how the schemes work, making mistakes, and eventually flying our family long haul in cabins we would never have paid cash for.
If you are new to all of this, start with our beginner’s guide to reward points, which explains what Avios are and how you earn them, and our guide to choosing an airline reward scheme. This page is the next step: the actual booking, screen by screen, using a real search we ran for two seats to New York.
To book a reward flight with Avios, log in to ba.com, search with “Pay with Avios” selected, pick your dates from the availability calendar (reward seats are released about 355 days before departure), choose your cabin, then choose between paying all Avios or a mix of Avios and money. You always pay the taxes, fees and carrier charges in cash. Two of us flew return to New York in economy for 110,000 Avios and £300, against a cash fare of £1,445.20 for the same seats.
Last checked: September 2026. The Avios prices and cash charges below are the ones we saw for a March 2027 search; they vary by date and route, and BA changes the pricing from time to time.
It is free, and you need to be logged in to see reward availability at all. If you have not joined, our British Airways Club guide explains the account, the household account that lets a family pool Avios, and every way we collect them.
Not necessarily all of it, because BA lets you part-pay, but the more you have the more options you get. How we earn most of ours is in the British Airways Club guide.
Reward seats go on sale about 355 days before each flight. If you want the school holidays, or a specific cabin on a specific day, you need to be searching almost a year out. If you are flexible, you can book much closer to the date, and there are often seats.
Reward bookings can be changed or cancelled for a fee of £35 per person, and on cancellation the Avios and the taxes come back. Booking early is not the gamble it sounds.
Log in at ba.com, go to the flight search on the home page, and tick “Pay with Avios” (on the app it is a toggle at the top of the search). Enter your route, the number of passengers and a rough date.
Rather than a single day, BA shows you a calendar of reward availability around your date, which is the screen that makes the whole thing work. Green dates have seats; grey ones do not. This is where you find out whether your half term plan is realistic.
Pick a date and BA lists the flights that day with the cabins available on each. For our search, BA0117 out and BA0182 back both had economy, premium economy and business seats.
If you search on ba.com rather than avios.com you will see the same thing laid out slightly differently: a strip of dates across the top marked off-peak or peak, and under it the day’s flights with how many reward seats are left in each cabin. When it says “4 left”, it means four.
Each cabin shows its Avios price per person, per direction. For London to New York in March 2027, off-peak, we saw:
Economy (World Traveller): 27,500 Avios each way.
Premium economy (World Traveller Plus): 46,750 Avios each way.
Business (Club World): 88,000 Avios each way.
Select the flights you want and the running total at the bottom of the screen updates as you go. Two of us, economy, out and back, came to 110,000 Avios.
The prices depend on whether the date is peak or off-peak on BA’s calendar, so if you can shift a week either side of a school holiday, check both. The difference on a long haul business seat can be tens of thousands of Avios.
This is the screen that surprises people the first time. BA does not just show one price. It shows a row of options, from the most Avios and the least cash to the fewest Avios and the most cash, and you pick the balance that suits your account.
We always take the option with the most Avios and the least cash, because we collect Avios for exactly this and would rather keep the money. If you are a few thousand Avios short, though, the part-pay options are how you still get the seat.
You may see “Reward Flight Saver” on the options. It is BA’s fixed, lower cash charge for reward bookings, which started on short haul and now also applies to economy and premium economy on many long haul routes. In practice it is why our two economy seats to New York carried £300 in charges rather than the several hundred pounds each you might have read about. The charge and the routes it covers change, so treat the figure on screen as the answer rather than anything you read elsewhere, including here.
The journey summary shows the Avios, the cash charges and the flights together. Ours read 110,000 Avios plus £300 for two people, return, in economy.
To see what that saved us, we ran the same two seats as a cash booking. BA’s own Economy semi-flex fare was £1,445.20 for the two of us.
Being fair to the comparison, we also checked a comparison site. The cheapest option on our dates was American Airlines at £544 per person, so £1,086.40 for two, on a less flexible fare.
So the honest version is this: for 110,000 Avios, earned on shopping we were doing anyway, two of us fly return to New York for £150 each. Against BA’s fare that is a saving of more than £1,100; against the cheapest airline going, about £500. Both are worth having, and the Avios bought us BA’s flexibility and its change terms rather than the cheapest seat on the route.
If you hold a British Airways American Express card and have a companion voucher, the booking screens above are the same, with one difference – once the voucher is applied, the Avios price for the second passenger drops to zero and BA shows it struck through. That is the only thing this section covers. How you earn the voucher, which cabins it works in, how long it lasts, what happens with two vouchers, and the two-stage booking you need on release day are all in our Amex companion voucher guide.
We priced the same New York dates in business class with a Premium Plus voucher. Business was 88,000 Avios per person each way. With the voucher applied, the second seat’s Avios fell away and the summary came to 176,000 Avios plus £998 in charges for two people, return, in Club World. The cash fare for the same seats, BA’s Business Flex, was £7,997.20.
On every flight it operates there are at least eight economy reward seats, and on long haul at least four in business and two in premium economy, set aside for Club members. Popular routes often have more. This is why booking a year out on a big route almost always works.
New dates open at 00:00 UK time, 355 days ahead. If it is a date you really need, be logged in and ready. We have also had success calling BA’s US contact centre in the evening UK time, when the date has opened for their day but the UK phone lines have closed; it is worth a try if the website is fighting you.
New York, Los Angeles, Dubai and the big hub airports release more reward seats than the quieter routes. If your first choice has nothing, look at where the big aircraft fly and plan the trip from there. Our Pacific Northwest road trip started in Seattle for exactly that reason.
A reward flight on Iberia, Aer Lingus or Qatar Airways can carry lower cash charges than the same route on BA, and you search for them on the same ba.com screen. Our Santiago business class seats were on Iberia.
A reward seat on a £60 European flight is rarely worth the Avios. The value is in the fares that would otherwise be £600 and up, which is why every example on this page is transatlantic.
Make sure the Avios and the cash charges on your confirmation match what you saw on screen, and after the flight, that any Avios you were due have landed.
Most of the Avios in the examples above were not earned in the air. They came from shopping we were doing anyway, put through the Avios eStore, plus the sign-up bonus on a BA Amex card.
How the eStore works, the click path from ba.com and avios.com, and what the retailers were paying when we last checked are all in our British Airways Club guide, so we will not repeat them here. If you are starting from zero, read that first and come back to this page when you have a balance to spend.
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