What You’ll Need
If you’re doing a speculative booking, feel free to skip ahead to the next step for how to use the “Book with Avios” online tool to go run a search and see if there is reward availability for your chosen flight and how much the taxes and fees are. Otherwise, by this stage, you should have everything you need to book your flights:- Your flight information from Google Flights
- Departing airport
- Arriving airport
- Travel dates
- Airline(s)
- Enough Avios in your British Airways Executive Account to cover your flight(s)
- Your credit Card (preferably your American Express Platinum Card to earn 3x travel reward points, or your best travel rewards card) to pay for the associated taxes, fees and carrier charges.
Book Online with Avios
It’s worth noting the British Airways website can be quite frustrating to work with. Things are constantly broken, and there is a known list of gremlins on their website. You can also phone the British Airways Executive Club to make your booking as well. <<<<<link>>>> Here are the flight details for our example in this post. We’ll be booking:- A round-trip flight
- for one passenger,
- economy,
- from Vancouver, BC
- to Hong Kong
- with a departing date of Friday, October 9, 2020,
- and a return date of Thursday, October 29, 2020.
- From your account dashboard, near the top, click “Book with Avios”
- Enter your “From” and “To” airports
- If you’ve found a suitable return flight, select “Return”. If you’d like to piece together your flight itinerary separately, select “One-way”.
- Enter your travel dates.
- Select your travel class.
- Select the number of passengers, and ages of children (if applicable).

- No, I want to continue without stopovers. (I usually leave this selected by default).
- I want to break my journey and choose my stopovers.

Review Outbound (Departing) Flight Options

Review Inbound (Return) Flight Options

Select Your Outbound (Departing) Flight

Select Your Inbound (Return) Flight

Choose Your Points/Cash Redemption Options
Before we continue, let’s review our final cost and pricing options for our trip: Click on “more pricing options” to view the options for doing a cash/points split. This is incredibly useful if you are short on points and would rather cover the rest with cash. Here is where we can see the breakdown of how many miles we need to redeem, as well as the cash price for taxes, fees, and carrier charges. If you’re doing a mock booking, this is the process you would go through to see the total cost of your flight (as we covered previously). The taxes, fees, and carrier charges vary by airline, and location, so it’s always a good idea to check.
- 49,600 Avios + $495.19
- 40,300 Avios + $625.19
- 31,000 Avios + $745.19
- 24,800 Avios + $855.19
- 21,700 Avios + $905.19

Review Your Price Quote
On the following page, we can review the price quote and itinerary for our flight selection.

Add Passenger Details
On the next page we can fill out the details for all passengers.
Enter Your Payment Details
And on the final screen, I can enter my payment details to process the charges for the taxes, fess, and carrier charges. Remember to charge your purchase to your best travel rewards Card so you can earn extra points for your travel purchase. It’s worth noting you can also pay via PayPal for the booking charges. Then just click “Make Booking” to complete your booking, and you’re all set! For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m not going to complete the booking, but on the next screen you’ll see a confirmation page and you’ll also receive an email with your travel itinerary, and e-ticket.
Alternatively, Book via Phone
If you’d rather book by phone rather than use the website, or you want to make that booking for your Alaska Airlines flights to Hawaii, here are the details for how to do that: Booking with Avios by phone is easy. Just make sure you have everything you need ahead of time:- Your flight information from Google Flights
- Departing airport
- Arriving airport
- Travel dates
- Airline(s)
- Your credit Card (preferably your American Express Platinum Card to earn 3x travel reward points, or your best travel rewards card) to pay for the associated taxes, fees and carrier charges.
All Done – Congratulations!
Congratulations! That’s it – you’ve booked your flights using British Airways Avios and can start looking forward to your trip! Thank you so much for following along with our Beginner’s Guide to Mastering British Airways Avios! I hope you’ve learned how to get the most value out of your travel rewards and never pay full retail price again, while gaining access to some very cool perks such as airport lounge access worldwide. Travel hacking certainly does take work (and if you’ve read this whole guide, you’ve put in some time into learning the craft), but just remember that you are teaching yourself a new skill that you can use over and over again for future trips. Now that your trip is booked, go enjoy yourself and let us know where you end up from using your travel rewards! Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions about using Avios, or if there’s something you’d like to see. Bon voyage! Britt, PointsWiseEarn
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