Leveraging the Avios Hotels platform
There’s a new way to boost the number of points you can earn through hotel stays. The standard method of booking hotels through the Avios Hotels website will give you a generous 10 Avios for every £ you spend (including, even more generously, on any taxes and fees). There is a way to boost to an astronomical 33/£, but is it worth it?
What is the Avios hotels platform?
It’s a wrapper around Expedia that allows you to earn Avios points on hotel stays. The price you pay per night is nearly always the same as if you booked through a hotel aggregator. The difference is that you get 10 Avios for every pound you spend on hotels.
If you are spending on hotels, then this is a way to earn thousands, or even tens of thousands, of points without incurring any additional cost.
Sometimes the earn rate is boosted. This typically happens after Christmas, and last year it was increased to 15 points per pound.
The offer is already generous, but it’s worth saying that you earn points on the total amount you pay. That means you’ll earn on taxes, resort fees, and the room rate.
The Avios Hotels website is part of the main Avios.com site.
How to increase the earning rate.
There are two ways to earn an even higher rate on a hotel stay.
The first method is simple. Use a credit card that gives you Avios points. The highest earning cards (the BA Premium Plus and the Barclaycard Avios) will give you an additional 1.5 per pound, increasing the rate to 11.5. That extra 1.5 might not seem a lot. If you’re going all-in on a luxury hotel and spending £5,000, that’s another 7,500 Avios on top of the 50,000 Avios you’ll earn from Avios hotels.
The second method is to boost your Avios on the hotel booking. This is similar, but not the same as Boosting Avios on your account. The latter allows you to take one or multiple Avios-earning transactions on your account and to double, triple or quadruple them at a very good rate. It’s likely to be the most cost-effective way to increase your balance.
The Avios Hotels boost works in a similar way. If you’re paying cash for a hotel (rather than using your Avios to pay for the room), then you can double, triple or quadruple the points you would have earned.
You will not get the points immediately. They will be in your account 31 days after you check out of the hotel. This is important because most people who boost their Avios do so because they need the points today. In fact, if you use the traditional Boosting process, you will get them in a matter of minutes.
Here’s an example hotel booking, and the cost of boosting:
A six-night stay at the well-priced Doubletree on 5th Avenue, Manhattan costs £1,342.32 per night.
That would earn me 13,425 Avios. That’s slightly more than 10 points per £1, and as I mentioned, they are being even more generous by giving me points on the part of the transactions that relate to taxes or fees. The actual room cost is £1,156.26 when you remove those elements.
I’m then given three options to boost my points. These are simply to 2x, 3x or 4x the points that I will earn from the hotel booking.
All three options work on a 0.93p per point rate. You are paying just under 1p per point to increase your Avios. This does not take into account the Avios you get from the hotel booking itself, which is effectively 10p per point. Of course, you’re getting those points for”free” as you’re paying for the hotel room.
Boosting your points directly through Avios.com gives you a price of 0.92p per point. In simple terms, it is cheaper and faster to boost your Avios points rather than a hotel booking.
Is this really 33 points per £
Yes and no. You will earn a maximum of 31.28 points per £ that you spend on hotels. That’s 32.78 if you pay using an Avios-earning credit card. However, you will be paying for the extra Avios at a rate of 0.93p per point. Technically, you’re earning 33 points per pound, but your total cost has increased.
The use cases for this are quite limited.
Why would you use a boost with Avios Hotels?
Given that it’s fractionally cheaper to boost your regular Avios points, and you get the points straight away, there’s a limited number of reasons why you would use the boost on Avios hotels.
- It’s not your money: if your employer, or someone else, is paying for the room, then you’re not actually paying for the boost. This is obviously somewhat naughty; however, some hotel brands allow you to pay a higher nightly room rate to get additional points from the stay so there is a precedent of sorts. I am absolutely not saying you should do this, and I do not have visibility on how the transaction appears on a credit or debit card and whether it’s obvious.
- You don’t know any better and think it’s a good deal. This is the reality of lots of aspects of earning and spending points.
- You don’t have any Avios transactions in your account to boost, so this is the next best option (and you’re happy waiting until 31 days after you check out to get those points).
My advice is to stick to the standard, and generous, 10 points per pound earn rate for Avios hotels. Increase it yourself by using an Avios earning credit card, or wait around to see if Avios increase that earn rate for a period.
Will you actually get your points?
I have received 100% of the points I was due for the hotels I booked. Over the last three years, I’ve had eleven reservations through Avios Hotels, from single-night stays that earned me just over 3,000 points to a fight-night stay at the Pan Pacific Singapore that earned me almost 50,000 points.
I fully expect points for every booking, but if you’ve used the Avios Shopping website, you’re right to be concerned about actually receiving them. Here’s why the Avios Hotels website is very different.
The Avios Shopping website relies on cookies (or similar) that track you on a third-party website. There are a few different technical reasons why you could buy something on, say, Asos, and that transaction doesn’t get tracked properly back to your Avios account.
I had a lot of issues with earning Hilton Honors points through the Avios Shopping website historically. Ultimately, it’s a fragile process, and I would estimate that 70% of Avios Shopping transactions actually result in points landing in your account.
With the Avios Hotels site, you do not jump anywhere. The transaction takes place on the site, so there are no issues around tracking your stay. The site sees the booking and owns the transaction itself.
Obviously, if you cancel the trip, then you won’t earn the points on it, but that’s not a fault; that’s by design.
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