What is the cheapest way to buy Avios points?

There are multiple ways to buy Avios points

Growing your Avios balance can often mean paying for points. There are many ways to swap money for Avios, yet despite doing the same thing, they vary significantly in price. Some approaches deliver points to your account immediately, whilst others spread them out over time. This post explains the different ways to buy Avios points and their pros and cons.

How can you buy Avios points?

Here are the primary ways to swap money for points:

• Buy them outright from Avios.com [Instant]
• Buying them via another Avios-using airline [Usually instant]
• Boosting your Avios [Instant]
• Subscribing to Avios [Spread out over time]

The price of each approach varies. There is no sane reason for the cost differences; the points you get are the same, and in most cases, the points are coming directly from Avios themselves.

Whilst we haven’t seen any promotions around boosting points or the Avios subscription, there have been promotions around buying points. Given that you can buy Avios from Qatar, Finnair and Iberia, as well as from British Airways, more often than not, there will be a promotion active, especially during off peak periods.

Avios subscriptions don’t work for you if you want points immediately. Instead, this approach is best if you have longer-term goals, and you want to add to your points every month at a controlled cost. It is cheaper than buying points, but not as cost-effective as boosting them.

The cheapest way to buy Avios points

The cheapest way to buy points is to boost them. I wrote a much longer article about Avios Boosts. In fact, just to make it more complex, there is now a way to boost the points you earn from Avios Hotels. I wrote about this, but it is not instant (31 days after you check out from the hotel), and it is fractionally more expensive than a regular boost.

So in simple terms, Boosting is the cheapest way to buy points. Subscriptions are the second cheapest method, but the points are not delivered immediately or in one go.

Buying points, unless there is a promotion active, is the most expensive method, and yet it is (unfortunately) the most obvious one.

How else can you earn points?

There are two notable ways to increase your balance, and I recommend you review both of them. Neither one will give you points quickly, but they do allow you to leverage things that you were planning on doing anyway (shopping online, or booking a hotel) and earn points.

The Avios Hotels platform is an easy way to earn points at a healthy rate (10 points per £ you spend). I wrote about Avios Hotels and how it works. Hotel pricing is in line with booking aggregators like Hotels.com and Booking.com, and it is the most lucrative way to earn from hotels. The 10/£ earn rate is occasionally increased to 15 during peak periods (the last time was in January).

We use Avios Hotels a lot, and have picked up hundreds of thousands of points. It’s an easy and reliable way to increase your balance, but you do not get the points until around 30 days after you check out of the hotel.

The Avios Shopping website is another favourite method of mine to increase our balance. You can earn points for every pound you spend on hundreds of online shops. You don’t have to do anything special, other than visit the Avios Shopping website, click on the retailer and then make your purchase straight away.

The points you earn range from 1 per £, up to 16 per £ (and sometimes higher). As well as earning from shops, you’ll also find banks, telecoms companies, insurers and hotel brands on the site. It can be very lucrative, especially around the Christmas period. Avios typically run a 50% boost on the earn rate promotion.

What about Credit Card promotions?

You can earn points when you sign up for a credit card and hit a certain level of spend.

At the time of writing, American Express have the best sign-up bonuses.

• The free British Airways card will give you 5,000 Avios when you spend £2,000 on the card within the first three months.
• The paid version of this card (£300/year) will give you 30,000 Avios if you spend £6,000 in the first three months.

Both of those cards will deposit the Avios straight into your account. Your sign up bonus will be given to you once you hit the spend requirements, whilst the points you earn from spending on the card itself will be transfered a day or two after the end of your billing month.

Amex also offers its standard (non-BA) cards that earn Membership Rewards points. These can be swapped for Avios at a 1:1 rate, and this transfer is usually instant.

• Their Gold card costs £195/year but is £0 for the first year. You can earn 50,000 Membership Reward points (which you can swap for 50,000 Avios) if you spend £5,000 in the first six months.
• The Platinum card costs £650/year, and you can earn 95,000 Membership Reward points if you spend £6,000 in the first three months. Those points can be swapped for 95,000 Avios

Finally, Barclays have two Avios-earning cards that have sign-up bonuses.

• The free Barclaycard Avios will give you 5,000 Avios points if you spend £1,000 in the first three months
• The premium Barclaycard Avios Plus costs £20/month (£240/year), and you’ll earn 25,000 Avios if you spend £3,000 in the first three months. At the time of writing, you will earn another 10,000 Avios if you spend £6,000 in the first six months.