This is the final segment of our Beginner’s Guide to Mastering British Airways Avios series, where we’ll take a look at the last piece of the travel rewards puzzle – actually booking your flights! Or, if you’re checking reward availability, you can follow along for this post and see how to use the “Book with Avios” online tool. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be a pro for when it comes time to book your flights, as it’s essentially the same process. The process of booking your flights is really straightforward, but here for your reference, in case you have questions along the way. If you’ve followed along so far, you’ll be familiar with how to earn Avios in Canada, how to determine how many points your trip will take, how to redeem Avios and what airlines you can fly from Canada, how to transfer your points from American Express to British Airways, and of course, the ultimate sweet spot: How to redeem Avios for Hawaii flights. We’ve covered a lot in this guide, so let’s wrap things up and get your trip booked!

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:

1. Your flight information from Google Flights
   1. Departing airport
   2. Arriving airport
   3. Travel dates
   4. Airline(s)
2. Enough Avios in your British Airways Executive Account to cover your flight(s)
3. 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.

<<< insert screenshot >>>

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.

We’ve already done our homework and have already checked award availability, know what airlines we’ll be flying, and have enough points in our account. So let’s continue: To book, simply login to your Executive Club account.

1. From your account dashboard, near the top, click “Book with Avios”
2. Enter your “From” and “To” airports
3. If you’ve found a suitable return flight, select “Return”. If you’d like to piece together your flight itinerary separately, select “One-way”.
4. Enter your travel dates.
5. Select your travel class.
6. Select the number of passengers, and ages of children (if applicable).

On the next screen, at your preference, you can select:

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

We’ll select “No, I want to continue without stopovers”. PointsWise Tip If you keep getting random errors with the British Airways website, try searching in a Google Chrome incognito window. The only way I could get this next page to load for the sake of this tutorial was to change my travel date…booking online with Avios can be finicky. We’ve already found availability for non-stop flights on both our outbound and inbound flights. And there is plenty of availability in economy on both our outbound and inbound flights. There is also some premium economy and business class availability if we were interested. I’ve taken a screenshot of what the next page looks like and broken it up into several images for better readability. This is where we can select our flight options, and cabin class. PointsWise Tip Using the “Book flights with Avios” tool can take more time because the booking calendar and flight options are spread across several pages, and are not the easiest to navigate. If you’re just doing a speculative booking, you can use the American Airlines website as it will show the same availability and is easier to use. I already know from checking award availability earlier, that direct flights on surrounding dates were not available, so I intentionally chose my flight to be: departing October 9, and returning October 29, 2020. This is where it pays to do your homework in advance and piece together your flight routes using Google Flights.

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. We can redeem 62,000 Avios miles plus $275.19 in taxes, fees and carrier charges for our return trip, economy flight from Vancouver, BC to Hong Kong. Or, if we click on “More pricing options” we can do a points/cash split:

• 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

Since we have enough points, we can continue with the booking and redeem 62,000 Avios. Let’s click “Continue” to proceed.

Review Your Price Quote

On the following page, we can review the price quote and itinerary for our flight selection. I’ll click “I agree to the terms and conditions” and hit Continue.

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. If you make a mistake, or decide you no longer want this plane ticket, you’ll have up to 24 hours to cancel your booking. Just call British Airways Executive Club and speak to a representative to have them cancel your booking and process a refund for the related charges. Congratulations! That’s it – you’ve booked your flights using British Airways Avios and can start looking forward to your trip!

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:

1. Your flight information from Google Flights
   1. Departing airport
   2. Arriving airport
   3. Travel dates
   4. Airline(s)
2. 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.

Call the British Airways Executive Club Phone Number: Canada: 1-800-452-1201 Hours of Operation: 7:30 am to 8 pm daily, eastern time Press 1 then 2 to book Booking over the phone is straightforward, just tell the booking agent where you’re going from and to, as well as your departure date and they will find the flights in their system based on the information you’ve given them. If you’ve pieced together your travel itinerary correctly, and there is award availability (the phone rep can confirm this), then you’ll be asked to provide your credit card (your best travel rewards Card) to charge the associated taxes and fees. Remember to try and use a travel rewards Card with a travel spending bonus, such as the Amex Platinum where you’ll earn 3x the points on travel. If you’re facing a long hold time, just hang up and phone back. I’ve found hold times to be hit or miss. After the rep has confirmed everything with you, your trip is booked and you’ll receive an email shortly after with your travel itinerary. If you make a mistake, or decide you no longer want this plane ticket, you’ll have up to 24 hours to cancel your booking. Just call British Airways Executive Club and speak to a representative to have them cancel your booking and process a refund for the related 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, PointsWise