BA Amex Companion Vouchers can now be used on British Airways Holidays bookings - here's when it makes sense

From today, you can now use your BA Amex Companion Voucher on British Airways Holidays packages and get 25% of your Avios back. This doesn't change how a Companion Voucher normally works on a Reward Flight booking, it's an additional way to use it, and a temporary one, running only until 31 March 2027.

So is this a feature, or an offer? Who knows. Anyway, let me run you through it.

How it works

You book a British Airways Holidays package on the BA Holidays website. That's a Flight + Hotel or Flight + Car booking. This will not work if you book a flight and then add on a hotel or car hire later on.

You pay using Avios as either full or part payment of the package.

Within 72 hours of booking your BA Holiday, you fill out a claim form (which can be found here) to use a Companion Voucher. BA credits 25% of the Avios you spent back to your account within two working days, with your voucher being cannibalised in the process.

There is a cap on the amount of Avios you could possibly get back depending on which card you have:

• Free BA American Express Companion Voucher: up to 50,000 Avios back per booking

• BA Amex Premium Plus Companion Voucher: up to 200,000 Avios back per booking

The form is a bit of an annoying step, as every other Avios use on BA applies at checkout, meaning if you forget the form, it doesn't submit properly etc, you'll lose the rebate.

Actual perks to using a Companion Voucher on a holiday booking

The voucher only needs to be valid at the time of booking

On a Reward Flight, your outbound has to depart before the voucher expires. On a Holidays booking, the voucher just needs to be valid the day you book. So if your voucher expires tomorrow, you can book today for a holiday in 11 months time. That's particularly useful for free card holders, where the 12-month voucher window feels short from the moment your trigger the voucher.

There's no Reward Flight availability requirement (!!!)

This is the bigger one. Normally a Companion Voucher only works when there are reward seats available on a specific flight. With holidays, you can use it on any flight that forms part of an eligible package, regardless of reward availability. And this includes flights on a number of BA partners too, such as Qatar Airways, SriLankan and Qantas... Basically, any airline that is available as part of a package on the BA website.

Bookings can also be for up to nine travellers, and you still earn tier points on the full cash price of the holiday before the Avios discount.

Is it good value?

I ran a 7-night Tenerife package for two adults at the Gran Hotel Taoro, departing Gatwick in September, total basket £1,750, and these are the Avios value figures:

Avios used	Cash off	Value per Avios	Avios back with voucher	Effective value per Avios
3,075	£29	0.94p	769	1.26p
7,375	£53	0.72p	1,844	0.96p
12,425	£76	0.61p	3,106	0.82p
24,975	£123	0.49p	6,244	0.66p
39,950	£170	0.43p	9,988	0.57p
65,750	£263	0.40p	16,438	0.53p
87,750	£351	0.40p	21,938	0.53p
117,000	£468	0.40p	29,250	0.53p
182,777	£731	0.40p	45,694	0.53p

Essentially, the more Avios you put in, the worse the rate per Avios gets. The smallest option (3,075 Avios for £29 off) works out at 0.94p per Avios. The largest (182,777 Avios for £731 off) drops to 0.40p. The voucher rebates 25% of your Avios at every tier, which pulls those numbers up to 1.26p and 0.53p respectively.

For context, anything below 0.7p per Avios isn't a great use of Avios. 1p starts to look reasonable, and 1.5p+ is what you'd hope for on a long-haul premium cabin reward flight. To see what your own Avios are typically worth on a Reward Flight booking, our British Airways Avios calculator will show you the per-Avios value for any route and cabin.

Against that backdrop, a holiday booking isn't the best. Only the smallest two Avios options on the table get above 0.7p without the voucher. And even on that best-value 3,075 Avios option, you're only getting 769 Avios back for burning the voucher.

That said, 769 Avios back is better than 0 Avios back, and we'll come back to that.

As your basket will look different to ours, and BA Holidays Avios values differ so much, you can plug your own numbers in below to see what each Pay with Avios option in your booking is actually worth, with or without the voucher applied.

Compare it to last week's BA Holidays offer

Last week we wrote about BA Holidays Pay with Avios being worth 33% more until 18 May. That offer had funny framing depending on which way you looked at it: 33% more value per Avios, or 25% fewer Avios needed for the same cash off. Same thing, different framing.

In Avios terms, last week's offer and this week's Companion Voucher feature/offer land in roughly the same place, they just take different routes to get there. Use the Tenerife booking as an example. Under last week's offer, £731 off would have needed about 137,000 Avios up front. Under this new offer, £731 off costs 182,777 Avios up front, with 45,694 rebated afterwards. Even with my dodgy maths, that's roughly 137,000 spent under each deal, you're just having to spend a Companion Voucher for the latter.

What this offer should have been

If you wanted to book a holiday using a Companion Voucher today, here's what you're already doing. Booking the flights as a Reward Flight, using the voucher in the usual way to bring your companion along for taxes and fees. Then go separately to book a hotel. Then a car hire. Then arrange any transfers yourself. That's three or four different bookings, three or four payment methods, and no ATOL protection on any of it.

What this offer should have been is the ability to wrap all of that into one BA Holidays package, with the Companion Voucher applied to the flight portion exactly as it would be on a standalone Reward Flight. You'd pay cash for the hotel and car at the often discounted BA Holiday rate, and the whole thing would sit under one booking reference with full ATOL protection, the 24-hour helpline, low deposit, transfers rolled in, the lot.

Oh, and let's keep the no Reward Flight availability rule when booking a holiday that this offer introduces while we're at it. You know, as a perk for booking a holiday (cheers BA!).

That would be a proper reason to book a BA Holiday, as your voucher does what vouchers are good at, saving you a tonne of Avios on the flight, and the holiday package handles everything else.

Where it might still be worth doing

I said we'd come back to it. The one scenario where this offer makes sense is if your voucher is about to expire and you have nothing else lined up.

If you're coming to the end of your Companion Voucher's validity, can't find Reward Flight availability for the dates you need, and were going to book a BA Holiday anyway, getting 25% of your Avios back is better than letting the voucher die unused.

That's the use case. You're not chasing the offer, you're salvaging a voucher.

Full information about this offer can be found on the BA website.

Sam

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