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Avios is the points program of British Airways (and Aer Lingus, Iberia and flybe). Avios exists in those airlines, for instance if of these airlines you have only a British Airways Executive Club account, you will only interact with Avios within British Airways.
Avios is increasingly being pushed as an umbrella over the airlines with more airlines to join. Avios.com is that umbrella platform. With an account, it is easy to instantly move points between Avios.com and the airlines. Officially you need a UK, Ireland or South Africa address to register. Perhaps a hotel you frequent.
Sidebar: I do not yet know what functionality a US resident has access to when signing up for a new Aer Lingus Aer Club account which doubles as the Avios account. Readers?
Avios.com has a different set of earn and spend partners than British Airways. An example is awards on Eurostar trains.
Announced today, 3 Avios.com partner airlines are going away:
- Monarch from 1/4/17
- Air Aurigny from 4/1/17
- Air Malta from 4/1/17
Until those dates, you can book for future travel and tickets will be honored.
The irony of “Giving you choice – More airlines, more airports”:
Monarch is primarily UK to European leisure destinations.
Air Aurigny serves the Channel Islands between the UK and France. Guernsey is one of my surprise highlights of Europe. The Channel Islands were the only parts of the UK occupied by the Germans in World War II. Culturally more British, geographically closer to France, they are compact and fascinating.
Air Malta…serves Malta, from points around Europe.
These are airlines of narrow interest so will not affect the majority of non-UK travelers. I used Avios.com for Air Aurigny flights and though I talk them up, I don’t know if I’ve convinced a single person to visit.
This does show the continued trend of BA and its affiliates to make cuts without any positive news. At least the announcement does not claim to be an ‘enhancement.’
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[…] British Airways Avios Losing 3 Airline Partners […]
I really wish Avios would expand to merchants in the US. I have a regular Avios account, BA and Aer Lingus but it’s hard to earn many of the Avios bonus points since the UK isn’t my primary home.
The loss of those airlines doesn’t effect me much.
What about BA’s own mall? I recently got BA points on a Target in-store pickup (in addition to getting a lower online price vs the store price).
Aer Lingus doesn’t give you much, sign up bonus points that transfer to other Avios accounts, redeem for upgrades on Aer Lingus. They even overcharge for Boston-Ireland flights. Eventually we should see various programs rolled up into a single one, at least that’s what IAG has told investors. In the mean time Aer Lingus has a United partnership. You can still earn Aer Lingus Aer Club Avios flying United (though you shouldn’t want to in most cases). But they didn’t bother building the redemption capability for the new program — which would have been cool, the ability to effectively redeem… Read more »
So best practice is still to set up standalone Avios.com first (with appropriate address) and then set up Aer Lingus using that account and collect the bonus, correct? I has existing Avios.com when I did Aer Lingus and happy to see I did not lose any functionality in the process.