50% Off Apple Using Avios Sounds Great – But is This Actually Good Value?

Did you know you can spend your Avios on things other than flights? Not just hotel bookings or seat upgrades, but actual stuff.

It’s called "The Edit", and if you haven’t heard of it, that’s probably because we haven't got round to it yet, sorry!

It’s essentially a separate part of the Avios Shop that allows people to use Avios to part-pay for products from Apple, Antler, Aspinal of London, Smythson and a handful of other brands.

When it first launched, you could only cover up to 25% of the price with Avios. As of yesterday, that cap has doubled to 50%, and there has been an expansion to over 300 products across 17 brands.

So, more products, bigger discounts. Sounds like progress. But the real question, is this a good use of your Avios?

How is 'The Edit' different from the Avios Shop?

I need to quickly clear this up. You might already know about the Avios Shop, where you click through to the likes of John Lewis and Booking.com and earn Avios on your purchases. If you don't, then we've got a full guide on how that works here, its one of our favourite ways to earn even more Avios!

The Edit is the opposite. Instead of exclusively earning Avios when you shop, you're spending them. It's a separate curated product range found within the "Spend Avios" section, and when you get to the checkout you choose how many Avios to put towards the price. For the portion that you decide to pay with cash, you'll collect 2 Avios per £1 on that chunk.

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What’s changed?

Avios announced yesterday that the amount of Avios you can redeem has increased from 25% to 50%. So before where you could only take a quarter off, you can now use Avios to cover half the cash price. The range has also expanded to over 300 products across 17 brands.

I stuck an "iPad Pro 11-inch (M5), 256GB" in my basket. It’s listed at £999, which is the same as on the Apple website, and at checkout you get a sliding scale of Avios options:

That last column tells you everything that you need to know. No matter how many Avios you throw at it, you’re getting 0.56p per Avios.

Regardless of what product you're buying, it’s a consistent 0.56p of value per Avios.

Two reasons why that’s not great

If you're a regular reader (hello again!), then you'll know that we always say you should be aiming to get at least 1p per Avios when you redeem. At 0.56p, using your Avios in this way does fall short. Just for some context, if you converted your Avios to Nectar points and spent them at Sainsbury’s, you’d get about 0.5p each. So buying that iPad is giving you a a bit more value than groceries.

There’s a second problem too. The iPad Pro M5 256GB is £999 in The Edit, which matches the Apple Store. But it’s not the cheapest place to buy one. At the time of writing, John Lewis has it for £944, and Amazon is in a similar ballpark. So you’re not only getting poor Avios value, you’re also paying full price on a product you could get cheaper elsewhere with cash.

Compare that to flights

Some of you with long memories (of two weeks) might remember that I had planned a trip to the Philippines with nearly all my flights booked using Avios. The trip didn’t end up happening (RIP suntan), but the bookings I’d made showed exactly what good Avios value looks like.

My first flight, a short business class hop on Finnair from Heathrow to Helsinki? That came in at 2.14p of value per Avios. The overnight business class flight on Finnair and Qatar Airways down to the Philippines? About 3.5p per Avios. The return through Doha on Qatar’s Qsuite? 2.8p per Avios. Those 88,880 Avios that would get you £500 off an iPad? Using only 80,000 of those would have got you all the way to the Philippines on a business class ticket worth thousands!

Bottom line

The Edit isn’t a scam. If your Avios are gathering dust and you’re never going to use them for flights, getting some money off an iPad is better than letting them expire (this happens after three years of no activity). The 50% cap is an improvement on 25%, and you’re still collecting Avios on the cash you spend.

But if there’s any chance you’ll fly using those Avios? Keep them. You’re looking at four to six times more value when you use them this way.

Flights first. Everything else a distant second.

Sam

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