A Breakdown of How you Earn Points, Calculate How Many you need for a flight, and then Spend Them

By Oscar Davis

Frequent flyer miles are still considered the currency of the business traveller, a reward for those who jet-set across the globe to meetings. The reality is that the majority of points collectors (and redeemers) are consumers, and they’re being leveraged by everyone from single young travellers to families.

It’s worth starting at the beginning and talking about what points actually are, how you get them and how you use them.
How do you actually collect Avios?

Collecting points is no longer about being rewarded for flights you have taken. In fact, earning points from flights is one of the least effective ways to earn points.

Let’s take Avios as an example, which is the points currency of airlines like British Airways, Qatar, Finnair and Iberia. Yes, you can earn points when you fly with those airlines, but you can also earn them from everyday shopping, renewing your car insurance, signing up for a new mobile contract and many more. There’s barely a month that goes by that Avios doesn’t announce a new way to earn points.

One of the lesser-known ways to earn Avios is through the online shopping portal. The world of points can be a little weird, so just bear with me on this. If you visit the Avios shopping website, click on a retailer, and then buy something from one of the thousands of shops listed, you’ll earn Avios.

Sometimes at rates of up to 15 points per £ you spend. That takes points collecting into the mainstream, day-to-day. It’s now entirely possible to collect tens of thousands of points without ever setting foot on a plane.

Booking a hotel? Don’t forget to collect your points.

Avios also operate a hotel website. This is in effect Expedia: it’s powered by that platform, and the pricing is exactly the same. The key difference is that you earn 10 Avios for every £ you spend on hotels, with the points landing in your account about a month after you’ve completed your trip.

This is another way to earn points on something that you were already going to pay for. That’s the key to building up your points balance: earn them on things you were already going to pay for, so there’s no additional expense.

Buying (or boosting) points

It’s worth saying that buying Avios points is not a cost-effective way to book flights, but you may be just short of the total you need to book a flight. You can, at any time, buy points directly from Avios, usually at a rate of around 2p per point.

You can also “boost” your points, which is a process where, instead of buying new points, you double, triple or quadruple the points you earned from something in the past.
Let’s say you earned 2,000 points from a hotel you booked last month. Boosting allows you to go back in time, take that 2,000 and then double it to 4,000. For reasons known only to Avios, this is much cheaper than buying points, at almost half the rate.

Spending your points

The most exciting part of points is spending them on flights, and the good news is that it has got easier and easier over time to book flights using Avios. You can now do everything online, and it’s aseasy as if you were booking a flight using cash.
It’s also worth mentioning that when you “pay” for a flight using points, there’s also a cash element to the booking. Airlines like British Airways will levy “surcharges” to the booking, which means you end up having to pay some cash towards it. Those charges change depending on the flight, the cabin you’re flying in and the airport and country you’re landing in.

Each airline that uses Avios has a flight search function. Sometimes that’s the same search area that you’d use to book a standard flight, so look out for a tick box around it that says “book using Avios”. British Airways has a separate booking page for Avios, just click on the “Book a flight using Avios” option in the Book menu.

Not all seats on each plane are available to book using points. Each airline has it’s own rules, with BA being the most generous. They guarantee that every single flight will have a minimum of eight seats in Economy you can book using points, two in Premium and four in Business.

Popular flights will get booked up early, and routes like London to Singapore (and then on to Australia) are notoriously hard to get. Qatar has a system where they will allow you to book into busy fights if you pay double the points. That’s useful, but it moves the bar on the points you need.

The best way to use your points is to be flexible, on both your dates and your destination. That could mean flying into Malaysia rather than Singapore, or Philadelphia instead of New York. It could also mean avoiding peak times during the year.

How to find Avios seats

An entire industry has sprung up to help travellers find reward seats. There are tools and platforms that will alert you when seats become available on the routes you’re interested in, but the airlines themselves also offer tools. Each airline has its own approach to letting you find ways to use your points.

The third-party platforms usually come at a cost, at least to get access to the really useful features. That cost is not huge, but it’s worth exploring the free options first. How many points do you need for a flight? If you’re saving points, you want to know how many you need to actually book and take a flight.

While the numbers needed can change (British Airways increased the points you need in late 2026), the points numbers are not secretive and are publicly available. You can carry out what’s called a dummy booking to understand the points (and cash needed).

That’s as simple as visiting the airline’s website and pretending you’re going to book a flight using points. As you get into the process you’ll be told how many points you need. There are also calculators that make it easy.  Pointszilla’s Avios calculator  is particularly easy to use as it breaks down all the potential points and cash options with British Airways.

How to get started with Avios.

It’s completely free to open an account. I’d suggest you do this sooner rather than later, and it only takes two minutes.
The next step is to consider everything you buy online and search the Avios shop for your favourite retailers. There are thousands of them listed, and they cover almost every major online shop.

There’s a mentality that avid points collectors adopt, and that’s every point counts. For example, if you link your Uber account to your BA account, you can earn 1 point per £1 you spend. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s zero effort (after you have set it up).