How we flew our family of five to Sri Lanka in business class using Avios
Today's post has been kindly written by 'an anonymous chemistry teacher'. She and her husband managed to take their family of five in business class Sri Lanka using Avios and voucher. The trick, flying via Mumbai!
We’ve been points enthusiasts for years, and for most of that time we had one goal that felt slightly out of reach: flying our family of five long haul in business class without paying cash fares, which would have cost us around £20,000.
My husband and I had already redeemed Avios on Qatar Airways Qsuites without the children, so we knew how good long haul business class could be. Getting five reward seats together was always going to be the tricky part.
In the summer of 2026, we finally did it. We flew all five of us to Sri Lanka via Mumbai, using Avios, two British Airways Companion Vouchers and a Barclays cabin upgrade voucher.
What we were looking for
The dream was lie-flat seats with privacy doors, to a bucket list destination. So we weren’t just looking for five reward seats. We wanted a British Airways route with the new Club Suites, rather than spending our hard-earned Avios and ending up in the older Club World “yin-yang” seats.
Two years of voucher collecting
We spent around two years collecting the vouchers we needed:
Two British Airways Companion Vouchers, earned through the British Airways Premium Plus (BAPP) Card. One was in my name and one in my husband’s, from cards opened consecutively over two years.
One Barclays cabin upgrade voucher, earned through the Barclaycard Avios Plus card in my name, opened a year after I closed my BAPP.
None of this came from a huge spending spree. We put as much of our everyday household spending on the cards as we could, including groceries, fuel, council tax and utilities, to hit the spending targets.
Timing mattered too, because the vouchers are valid for two years. We had to think ahead about when they’d be issued so they’d still be valid when we were ready to book. School holidays make booking even more restrictive, so working out when to trigger each voucher involved spreadsheets, dates and some slightly obsessive account checking!
We booked the flights in October 2025, around nine months before we travelled. Booking early mattered because reward availability for five people can disappear quickly.
Why Mumbai?
There was good reward availability for four people to plenty of destinations, but for five the options shrank to New York, Riyadh, Bahrain and Mumbai. We didn’t quite fancy the first three!
Our outbound date in July also fell on a BA off-peak date, which brought the Avios down.
We used Mumbai as our gateway to Sri Lanka, spending two nights there on the way out and one on the way back. What could have been an awkward connection became an extra part of the holiday. July isn’t the best time to visit Mumbai weather-wise, but for two nights it was perfectly fine.
From Mumbai, we booked SriLankan Airlines economy flights to Colombo separately. The return flight cost around £170 per person and took only about two and a half hours, so we were happy to fly economy for that bit.
How we booked five seats
With three daughters aged 17, 15 and 12, and three vouchers, we had to split the bookings between us:
I booked myself and our youngest, 12, using my Companion Voucher.
My husband booked himself and our 15 year old using his Companion Voucher.
We booked our 17 year old using the Barclays cabin upgrade voucher that was in my name.
Because our eldest’s booking was separate, I called British Airways and asked them to link it to mine. That connected the bookings in BA’s system, which was really useful when travelling as a family, because if there was any disruption, BA could see we were travelling together.
The Avios maths
For each of the four passengers on the Companion Vouchers, the cost was 95,000 Avios + £475 taxes. For our 17 year old on the cabin upgrade voucher, it was 115,000 Avios + £475 taxes.
In total, our five Club World seats cost 495,000 Avios + £2,375 in taxes. We then paid about £850 for the five return economy tickets between Mumbai and Colombo.
So our total flight spend was 495,000 Avios + £3,225 cash.
Without the vouchers, the five business class seats would have needed around 950,000 Avios. Instead, we spent 495,000, a saving of 405,000 Avios. The saving was great, but what made the whole strategy feel worthwhile was turning everyday household spending into business class flights for five.
(These prices were before BA’s recent increases to Avios prices and taxes and fees.)
Why Sri Lanka?
Sri Lanka had been on our bucket list for a long time, and it gave us the chance to combine long haul business class with a destination we genuinely wanted to visit.
It was an amazing family holiday and, after all the planning it took to find those five seats, it felt like a pretty special way to use our points.
What we learned
Booking five reward seats needs a different approach from booking one or two. For us, the key was finding a route that ticked three boxes:
Five seats available
The new Club Suites
An off-peak date to keep the Avios down
The other lesson was to start early. We’d spent two years collecting vouchers before booking nine months ahead, and without that planning, getting five seats together would have been much harder.
And now the girls are hooked…
The girls have well and truly caught the business class bug, and we’re not sure they’ll be quite as excited about long haul economy next time. We suspect “but remember when we had lie-flat beds?” will be making a regular appearance!
An anonymous chemistry teacher
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