Get points when you renew your car, pet, travel or home insurance
It’s one of the easiest ways to earn a chunk of Avios points. Each year, you have to renew your car, home or pet insurance, and those transactions could earn you up to 6,000 points each. For a two-car household, with a pet, it’s relatively easy to earn north of 15,000 points.
How do you earn Avios on insurance?
British Airways operates the Avios Shopping website. This is a fantastic way to earn points via online purchases, but despite the name, it’s not just about buying things from retailers.
There’s a growing number of companies listed that don’t fall into the typical e-commerce category, including telecoms companies, financial services, and insurers.
The site doesn’t just like the insurance companies themselves, but also the aggregators (Money Super Market, Go Compare, etc), so that means you can earn points on insurers that aren’t listed directly. Those aggregators also usually offer the best Avios rates.
The earnings rates for insurance companies run into the thousands. Unlike other stores on the Avios Shopping website, they typically don’t work on a points per pound basis.
Most other shops will give you a certain number of Avios points per pound that you spend. Instead, most Insurers work on a fixed amount of Avios. The earn rate may change based on the type of insurance (Car, Pet or Home), but not on the amount you spend on the insurance itself.
If you’re eager to earn points then insurance is a great way to do it. Almost everyone has to pay for some type of insurance each year. If you have your own home, a car, and a pet, then you’re looking at three policies that you really should be price checking annually.
The earn rate (thousands) means that it’s worth your while renewing to a new provider. Aggregators (like MoneySuperMarket) also make it as easy as posible to make the switch. That’s not to say it’s a five minute job. Nor should it be, as you’ll need to compare policies to make sure you have the same, or better, coverage.
Which insurance companies give you points?
Here’s the current list of insurance companies where you can earn Avios points directly
Pet Insurance
Travel Insurance
- Avanti Travel Insurance
- AllClear Travel Insurance
- Columbus Direct
- CoverForYou Travel Insurance
- Coverwise
- Explorer Travel Insurance
- Flexicover Travel Insurance
- Good to Go Travel Insurance
- Holiday Extras Travel Insurance
- InsureandGo
- JustTravelCover.com
- Saga Travel Insurance
- TravelSupermarket Travel Insurance
And here are the aggregator websites that you can earn points from, including what types of insurance products you’ll earn points for.
- Compare the Market (Earn on Car, Home, Travel, Pet insurance)
- Confused.com (Car, Van, Home, Life, Health)
- GoCompare (Car, Home, Van, Travel, Pet, Motorbike)
- MoneySuperMarket (Car, Home, Travel, Pet)
How much can you earn?
I’ve listed the top five options for each type of insurance in the set of tables below. These rates can change, but you can see the latest rates plus the historic earn rates for any shop on our Avios Shopping tracker. This microsite includes the earn rate for Virgin points as well.
Pet Insurance – the best Avios earn rates
| Type | Site | Earn Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Pet Insurance | ManyPets | 6,000 Avios |
| Pet Insurance | Waggel | 4,308 Avios |
| Pet Insurance | Go Compare | 4,000 Avios |
| Pet Insurance | 4Paws | 4,000 Avios |
| Pet Insurance | Admiral | 3,000 Avios |
Home Insurance – the best Avios earn rates
| Type | Site | Earn Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Home Insurance | GoCompare | 3,500 Avios |
| Home Insurance | Confused.com | 3,400 Avios |
| Home Insurance | uSwitch | 3,300 Avios |
| Home Insurance | MoneySuperMarket | 3,000 Avios |
| Home Insurance | Urban Jungle | 2,500 Avios |
Car Insurance – the best Avios earn rates
| Type | Site | Earn Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Car Insurance | uSwitch | 3,600 Avios |
| Car Insurance | GoCompare | 3,500 Avios |
| Car Insurance | Confused.com | 3,400 Avios |
| Car Insurance | MoneySuperMarket | 2,850 Avios |
| Car Insurance | Compare The Market | 2,500 Avios |
Travel Insurance – the best Avios earn rates
Unlike the other insurance types, Travel insurance is rewarded based on the amount you spend. With earn rates as high as 23/£ (Which would give you 2,300 for a £100 policy, not including tax), they are on par with the other insurance types.
| Type | Site | Earn Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Travel Insurance | Columbus Direct | 23 Avios/£ |
| Travel Insurance | MoneySuperMarket | 22/£ |
| Travel Insurance | Coverwise | 20/£ |
| Travel Insurance | Holiday Extras Travel Insurance | 15/£ |
| Travel Insurance | Saga | 15/£ |
How quickly will you get your points?
While the Avios earn rate is high, it’s going to take some time before your points land. The number of days varies significantly by insurer, but here’s a quick breakdown for the aggregators.
- Compare the Market: 130 – 180 days
- Confused.com: 150 – 180 days
- GoCompare: 150 – 180 days
- MoneySuperMarket: 90 – 180 days
- uSwitch: 90 – 120 days
That’s a long wait for points. If your insurance renewals are at different times of the year, it can bring a steady stream of points. For example, our car insurance renews in September, our Home insurance in February and our Pet insurance in August.
Is it worth the effort to change insurers every year?
When it comes to Avios alone, it really depends on how much you need the points. It’ll take 30 – 60 minutes to switch a policy, and you often have to get in touch with your current insurers to cancel that policy.
It’s worth saying that when you sign up with insurers, you might be given the option of the policy not automatically renewing, and if you believe that you’ll want to switch in a year’s time, you could leave that box unticked.
However, switching insurers every year can lead to cost savings. Loyal customers are rarely rewarded, and instead, the price reductions go to new customers, meaning you could save money and earn points.
Wanda for travel insurance
Avios has its own insurance service called Wanda. It’s travel insurance with a couple of interesting perks. Firstly, on top of the standard cover, your points themselves are covered. If you booked a flight using Avios points, then, based on your cover level, you could get up to 500,000 of the points that you spent on that flight back. Cover does not currently Amex 241 vouchers.
Some policies include a £25 flight delay payment. You have to register your flights with Wanda, and if they detect a delay of over 2 hours then they will pay £25 per traveller into your bank account. They promise that this is “fast”, but it doesn’t – for some reason – include cancelled flights, just delays.
And of course you earn points when you pay for a policy: up to 1,000 points on single trip cover, and 3,000 on annual policies.
The verdict on earning points from insurance
If you’re renewing your insurance each year, then it makes sense to earn Avios points from the transaction. As with any purchase from the Avios Shopping website, only buy the things that you would have bought anyway. Don’t buy just to earn the points.
The reliability of the Shopping portal has improved, but there will still be times when you’re denied the points from a transaction. Just recently, I lost out on thousands of points on a MoneySuperMarket travel insurance purchase, as Avios said that “your purchase is not eligible to earn Avios”.
It’s always frustrating when this happens, especially when it’s coming up to a year since I made the purchase. The email says I can contact Avios to dispute this, but the contact page won’t allow me to select the insurance company I bought from, and I get a message saying “We are unable to proceed with your claim”.
My best guess is that nine out of ten transactions will work. Some companies are just terrible. I wrote a while ago about how every single Hilton hotel I booked via the Avios Shopping portal was declined. The moral of the story is, don’t rely on the Avios store.
