When I called British Airways to complete the booking, the agent didn’t ask whether I wanted to use Avios. He asked how many. “Maximum points, I presume?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, the opposite.” There was a pause, then he laughed. “Really? You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who didn’t choose that.” He sounded genuinely surprised, which made me curious about something I hadn’t really considered before: what exactly was British Airways offering customers when it presented these different cash-and-Avios combinations?
The “use more points” assumption
Anyone who has booked a flight using points will recognize the menu. You are shown a range of cash-and-points combinations and invited to choose the one that suits you. The framing is subtle: points are presented as something to use up, while cash is something to protect. Using more points can therefore look like the obvious objective, rather than one of several transactions worth comparing.
The choices
The options I was shown looked like this:
28,000 Avios + £2.00
26,500 Avios + £11.94
21,500 Avios + £24.90
18,300 Avios + £55.16
11,700 Avios + £120.50
7,200 Avios + £156.10
Every option bought the same seat on the same flight. The only variables were how much cash I paid and how many Avios I used. That meant I could turn the menu around and ask a different question.
A different question
Instead of asking how many points I wanted to use, I asked:
What price am I being offered for my Avios?
Once you ask that, the list stops looking like a set of choices and starts looking like a series of bids.
Inverting the offer list
To make that explicit, I treated the “maximum points” option as the baseline and asked how much cash the airline was willing to pay me to keep Avios instead.
Option vs max points | Extra cash paid | Avios kept | Price per Avios |
|---|---|---|---|
26,500 vs 28,000 | £9.94 | 1,500 | 0.66p |
21,500 vs 28,000 | £22.90 | 6,500 | 0.35p |
18,300 vs 28,000 | £53.16 | 9,700 | 0.55p |
11,700 vs 28,000 | £118.50 | 16,300 | 0.73p |
7,200 vs 28,000 | £154.10 | 20,800 | 0.74p |
Put plainly, relative to the maximum-points option, British Airways was effectively offering me between 0.35p and 0.74p per Avios to keep rather than spend them. Since I valued Avios above every one of those prices, the direction of the decision was already clear.
A cash anchor, properly framed
For context, the cheapest cash fare available at the time was $335.50, or about £248 at the prevailing exchange rate. Compared directly with the maximum-points option of 28,000 Avios plus £2, that would imply a redemption value of roughly 0.88p per Avios.
But it wasn’t a like-for-like comparison. The Avios booking was a fully flexible, cancelable ticket, which was what I needed for this trip. The £248 fare was the cheapest non-flexible cash option available.
So £248 was useful as a cash anchor, but not as a clean denominator for valuing the redemption. It told me what the cheapest way onto the flight cost, not what the flexible ticket I was actually booking would have cost in cash.
My Avios valuation
At the time, I valued Avios at approximately 1.4 cents each, or about 1.04p at the same exchange rate. The precise valuation isn’t especially important here. What mattered was that every price British Airways was effectively offering me to use additional Avios, measured against the maximum-points option, was below the value I placed on keeping them.
A closer look at the marginal pricing
Comparing every option with 28,000 Avios tells me what British Airways was effectively offering for all the Avios I kept. Comparing adjacent options reveals something different: the marginal price of keeping the next tranche of Avios.
Moving from → to | Avios saved | Extra cash paid | Marginal price |
|---|---|---|---|
28,000 → 26,500 | 1,500 | £9.94 | 0.66p |
26,500 → 21,500 | 5,000 | £12.96 | 0.26p |
21,500 → 18,300 | 3,200 | £30.26 | 0.95p |
18,300 → 11,700 | 6,600 | £65.34 | 0.99p |
11,700 → 7,200 | 4,500 | £35.60 | 0.79p |
The curve isn’t remotely smooth. Moving from 28,000 to 26,500 Avios cost 0.66p for each Avios retained, while the next 5,000 cost only 0.26p each. The marginal price then jumped to 0.95p and 0.99p before falling to 0.79p for the final step.
Whether British Airways designed the menu with customer behavior in mind or the pattern simply emerges from its pricing model, the result is the same: there is no reason to assume that moving steadily toward either “more cash” or “more points” produces a steadily better or worse deal. Each step has its own price.
We ultimately canceled the ticket for unrelated reasons, after making the pricing decision; that doesn’t change the comparison above.
The takeaway
Nothing about this required finding a hidden award chart or exploiting an obscure rule. British Airways showed me all six prices. The useful step was simply to stop treating them as six ways to spend Avios and start treating them as a series of transactions between cash and Avios.
That’s the question I’d carry into any similar cash-and-points menu. Before deciding how many points to use, work out what price you’re being offered for keeping or spending the next ones. The answer may be very different from one step of the menu to the next.