Should you ever Part Pay with Avios?

It depends... Ordinally I would say this represents a poor value use case for your points, let me explain.

Lets say your balance is 160,000 Avios and you're wanting to fly to Chicago in Business Class. Your first, and the option I would recommend, is to check the availability of Reward Flight Saver seats. These are seats that British Airways releases to the public that can be booked fully by redeeming Avios. British Airways commits to releasing eight Economy seats, two Premium Economy, and four Business Class seats per flight. First Class seats do not have guaranteed availability, and can be released at a later date depending on how well that cabin is selling.

This is where the strategy can diverge. You search the dates you wish to travel, in this case its a pair of off peak dates in October, and as luck would have it there is one seat left in Business on both the dates. The total for this journey would be 160,000 Avios + £350 for "taxes and fees". If this is the outcome then you have hit the metaphorical gold mine.

If, when you search the dates, and there is no availability on your chosen dates, then you would have a few options:

• Could you fly in/out of different airports where Reward Flight Saver seats are available?

• Are you flexible with your dates?

Now if the answer to both of those questions is no, then this is where Part Pay with Avios comes into play.

The options presented to us offer relatively poor value.

For reference I have selected the same flights, on the same days, as where there was Reward Flight Saver availability. The total for this flight is £3,603.59. So if you were to use 80,210 Avios to save £376 then you'd be left with a total of £3,227.59, much more than the Reward Flight Saver cash amount.

If we drill down into the value per Avios spent amount, then each Avios spent in the Part Pay then on 80,210 Avios spent you'd only be getting 0.46p per Avios. For reference, the general rule of thumb should be trying to get 1p of value per point. So even when we consider it against this metric, we are getting half the value that we should be aiming for.

There is also the more theoretical metric, of how much is the fare in cash versus the amount of Avios required for the Reward Flight Saver seat. In this instance you would in effect be getting 2.25p per Avios spent, representing a much better value for your Avios.

The only time I would ever recommend using Part Pay is if you were inflexible with your dates, thus needing to travel exactly then, and you need to offset the cash price of the fare. But this would be an extreme case scenario, and even then, there are a couple of questions to ask yourself:

• Am I willing to change planes and connect to save money and points?

• Are there any other airlines I could fly?

In both of these question the attempt would be to try and save a bit more money on that fare to prevent you having to spend your points.

Hopefully this clears up the value that Part Pay offers you, the traveller.