Earlier this week I booked a Vueling flight using Avios and thought it would be a good idea to share some details about the booking process as there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of information out there about this.
I didn’t want to book this flight. My last experience of booking a Vueling flight, about a year ago, was a bit of a horror story.
But I needed a direct flight from Barcelona to London at fairly short notice on a peak day and I just couldn’t find an option to redeem miles, at least not in a conventional sense. I tried everything from extra BA Gold Economy availability, Gold Priority Rewards (I was inside the 30 days minimum booking period), BA OnBusiness points, Iberia Plus and a whole bunch else. Nothing worked.
So it was going to be a cash ticket and whatever I plugged in, Vueling kept coming back as the best option. Yet I couldn’t stomach paying what they were asking for a short hop from Barcelona to London, so I decided to reduce the price using Avios.
How to use Avios to book Vueling flights
The first thing you need to know is that redeeming Avios on Vueling isn’t a straight-up Avios redemption. You are essentially Part Paying with Avios, except, unlike when you do this on the British Airways website there is one key difference.
Vueling allows you to use Avios for the cost of your entire flight if you wanted to do so.
When you go to use Part Pay with Avios on the BA website, the amount of Avios you can use towards your flight is capped.
Here’s a random flight from London to Barcelona:
And here are my options if I want to Part Pay with Avios:
As you can see, I can reduce the total price by a maximum of £75, in exchange for 14,500 Avios – giving me a value of 0.51p per Avios.
That’s a poor redemption in anyone’s books. However, even if you decide – as I wanted to on this occasion – that you want to burn more of your Avios at that rate, the BA website doesn’t give you the option to do so.
The Vueling website, on the other hand, is more flexible.
How to use Avios to book Vueling flights
Visit the Vueling website and select your flights. On the next page, you’ll see a section that asks you for either your Vueling Club or AerClub details.
In this instance, I wanted to use some Avios that were sitting in my wife’s BA account. So she joined AerClub and used the Combine My Avios tool on the BA website to instantly move Avios from her BA account to the new AerClub account.
Unlike Iberia Plus accounts, Combine my Avios is available via AerClub immediately after creating an account. There’s no need to have some qualifying activity or wait 90 days.
The size of the discount offered varies according to the amount of Avios you have, so you won’t even be able to view the higher discounts if you don’t have sufficient miles. (I moved 60,000 Avios over just to be able to see the full range of discounts available and then transferred the remainder back). The value always remains between 0.5p and 0.55p per Avios.
Verdict
I don’t recommend redeeming Avios on Vueling flights on a general basis. The usual thinking when redeeming miles for otherwise expensive (peak) flights is that you’re making a genuine saving. Except, with Vueling’s Part Pay with Avios system, there’s no better or worse time to use Avios, simply because the value you achieve is always around 0.5p per Avios.
In my case, I was confident that enough of my Avios have been earned at a cost of less than 0.5p each. On that basis, I was OK using them on this occasion to reduce the cost of an otherwise expensive ticket, even though I’d normally target a far higher return when spending my Avios. I definitely won’t be making a habit of it though.
Have you ever used Avios for a Vueling flight?
Header image credit: JetKat / Shutterstock.com
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