We've made every mistake in points and miles so you don't have to, starting with the day we set fire to 100,000 Avios

If you're fairly new to this, or you've got a stash of Avios you're a bit scared of spending wrong, here's some good news. We've made all the mistakes for you!

Most of what we know about Avios and points, we learned by getting it wrong first, and inevitably that cost us. You'll see online people claiming to have optimised every point, never wasted a voucher, and they read every word of the terms before applying. I've not always been that person, and if I'm being honest, I'd be a little suspicious of anyone who says they always have been.

So here are three of my better cock-ups. Partly so you can have a laugh at my expense (you actually read these posts, so you've earned it), but also so you can learn from all of them, and you'll start to get a sense of why we offer the advice we do, so you don't make the same mistakes.

We'll start with the worst.

1. We put a companion voucher on the wrong flight, and it cost us over 100,000 Avios

Last year we booked First Class to Singapore with Avios for April. For the two of us it came to 238,000 Avios and £1,051.44 in taxes and fees, so about 119,000 Avios each. Was that a sensible use of points? Depends on your definition of the word. We'd never flown First before, and some things you just want to do properly at least once, right?

But this story actually started back in January, as we had a British Airways Premium Plus Amex Companion Voucher going to expire late June, so it was use it or lose it. We used it to book a Club Europe trip to Corfu for June. The voucher halves the Avios on a reward booking, so Corfu came to 19,250 Avios and £59. My birthday, lovely flight, no complaints.

Then March came round, and I booked Singapore for the end of April without telling Helena, surprise! No voucher this time, full whack. But at the time I booked it, we still hadn't flown to Corfu as that trip was three months away, so the voucher wasn't spent and gone. It was just sitting on a flight we hadn't taken yet.

A Companion Voucher halves the Avios on whatever you aim it at, in any cabin, all the way up to First. Aim it at Corfu and you save about 20,000 Avios. Aim it at First to Singapore and you save about 119,000. That's the same voucher, worth six times more, and yet we burned ours on a short hop to Greece.

The fix was to shuffle things round by cancelling the Corfu reward booking (which drops the voucher straight back into our account), rebooking Corfu as a cheap easyJet cash fare, and using the voucher on the Singapore flight, where it was worth 119,000 Avios instead of 20,000.

I think that's a lesson worth passing on to you.

2. We took out an Amex Gold for Helena, hit the spend, and got nothing back

In our defence, this was a few years ago, back when we were still working out which way was up.

Here's the order it happened in, because the order is the entire problem. Helena had held a British Airways Premium Plus Amex. Then, less than two years later, we took out the Amex Gold for the welcome bonus. She hit the spend. We waited. The points never turned up.

You probably know why that happened...

The bonus on the Amex Gold is only available if "you have not held a personal American Express Card within the previous 24 months". Helena had held one. The BA Premium Plus is a personal American Express card, and she'd had it well inside that two-year window, so the Gold bonus was never going to land.

Where we tripped up was assuming the cards were all walled off from one another, as the Premium Plus has it's own carve-out that allows you to still get the bonus as long as you haven't held another BA Amex in the past two years. We took that to mean the Gold played by the same rules, that a BA card and a Membership Rewards card sat in separate boxes and couldn't interfere with each other. They are not in separate boxes. Any personal Amex counts against the Gold, BA cards firmly included.

This one fortunately did not cost us anything as the Amex Gold is free for the first year, but that doesn't mean we should keep this one from you.

So check before you apply, every time, even when you're certain you're fine. We built a little tool that does it for you, mainly because we'd proved we couldn't be trusted to do it in our heads.

3. I saw Upper Class for 29,000 Virgin Points, decided to sleep on it, and ended up paying 69,000

You know the feeling. You stumble on a price that looks too good to be real, and instead of just booking the thing, you decide to be a responsible adult about it. You'll check the dates properly, have a look at hotels, maybe run it past whoever you're dragging along.

Virgin Atlantic prices its reward seats dynamically now, so the same seat can cost completely different amounts from one day to the next. Great when it's cheap, less fun when it isn't. (If you want the full version of how that differs from BA's fixed chart, I've written it up here.)

I found Upper Class out of Riyadh for 29,000 Virgin Points, which was a great deal. But I had a couple of other flights to fit around it, so I gave it a few days to line up the dates. By the time I went back, that same seat was 69,000. Forty thousand points, gone, because I fancied being thorough. (I booked it anyway. I'm only human.)

I know it feels wrong to book before you've planned the rest of the trip. But Virgin reward seats booked fully with points are refundable for a cancellation fee of £70. So when you spot a price you're happy with, book it first and sort the rest out afterwards.

So why does a list of my own mistakes qualify me to help you?

There's no guide called "the time I set 100,000 Avios on fire". You only learn this stuff by doing it yourself, or by reading someone who's already done it and survived the embarrassment. I'd much rather you read my own points mistakes then make your own.

As I've mentioned before, we don't have a corporate Amex with someone else picking up the bill. We're working it all out on the same cards you can apply for, making the same daft mistakes you might, just slightly earlier so you don't have to.

No doubt we will keep making new ones, so think of it as ongoing research.

Sam

Points Well Made is a passion project from Sam and Helena. If you've enjoyed this and want to help us keep the lights on, please consider buying us a Ko-fi or subscribing monthly. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for more of the same. Thanks for reading.