Last year Avios launched a new way to use your points
The Avios Shop (not to be confused with the Avios Shopping website) lets you reduce the cost of select home and travel products with points. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it was less useful than it could have been because the discount was limited to just 25% of the value. That is now changing
This isn’t the Avios Shopping Portal
Avios are launching so many new products that they’re running out of unique words to describe them. The Avios Shop is a place to buy items and use points to reduce the price. The Avios Shopping Portal is a way to buy things online and earn points. Two completely separate systems that do sound very similar. Avios also refer to their own shop as the Avios Edit.
How does the Avios Shop work?
I wrote a longer article at launch, but in simple terms you can buy things from a curated list of products and use Avios points to reduce the cost. The pricing is pretty much on par with the RRP. As an example, Apple products are the same price as buying from Apple direct.
You can also collect Avios points on the cash element of the purchase. A good example is an Antler suitcase that has a sticker price of £165. You can use just under 20,000 Avios points to get £115.50 off (equivalent to just over 0.57p per point), leaving you with £49.50 to pay. You’ll then earn 99 Avios on the cash part. That’s an earn rate of approximately 2 per £.
It is entirely possible to pick up items cheaper elsewhere, but the purpose of the shop is that you could use some points to reduce the cash element. However, there was a hard cap of 25% on the maximum use of Avios points, meaning that you would always pay at least 75% of the total price in cash. In some cases, the maximum % discount was much lower. On some Apple products I found that you could only pay 7% of the total price using points.
The Avios Shop has a mixed selection of things to buy, but they cover some credible brands.
- Apple
- Antler
- GHD
- Nespresso
- Ninja
- Philips
- Smeg
You can view all the brands in the shop on the Avios website.
What’s on offer broadly sits within five categories: Apple products, luggage, beauty products, audio and small appliances.
What change has been announced?
You can now use Avios points for up to 75% of the price of an item. This takes the cash element of a purchase from being barely below what you would find on a third-party site like Amazon, to much cheaper.
How competitive are the prices?
They’re more aligned with buying direct from the manufacturer than being the cheapest in the market. The Apple products are all the same price as buying from the Apple website. Other products you can pick up cheaper elsewhere.
An example is the Ninja Dual Zone AirFryer. This is £200 on the Avios Shop, but you can get it for £150 from Currys. If you use 27,575 points, you can reduce the price to £50.
Who would use this?
The most obvious use case is having some leftover Avios. If you have no plans to spend them, you can at least get some value.
You may also have a glut of points, and you want to use them. There’s also a group of people who either do not want to, or simply cannot, use their Avios for flights. They got into the scheme to fly business class, but for whatever reason that is not going to happen. Instead, they move to a position where they are happy to collect points, and then spend them on other things: Pizza Express, swap them to Nectar or use them in other ways like through the Avios Shop.
The value you get from your points on the Avios shop does vary. On some example Apple products I looked at, you’d get between 0.54 and 0.59p per point. This isn’t great, but it’s still better than converting them to Nectar points.
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