On 27 May 2026 the cash you pay alongside your Avios went up by as much as a third on some routes, while the Avios prices themselves did not move. It reads like a small housekeeping change. It was not — and it landed hardest on the people holding a companion voucher.
A devaluation usually shows up as a bigger Avios number. This one did not. The Avios stayed put and the cash moved instead — which is exactly why it slipped past most coverage. Look at who pays that cash, though, and a clearer picture appears: this was a quiet, targeted trim to the value of the companion voucher, the one perk that discounts Avios and does nothing for cash.
Most of the coverage led with the percentage. Up to 33 per cent, said the headlines, and one route went up by 150 per cent. Both figures are true and neither is very useful, because the 150 per cent was three pounds. What follows is the version with the arithmetic shown.
These are the four examples British Airways used in its own member email, with the figures that applied the day before — all returns for one passenger on off-peak dates.
| Redemption | Avios | Cash before | Cash after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York JFK, Club World | 176,000 | £399 | £499 | +£100 (+25%) |
| Cape Town, World Traveller | 66,000 | £170 | £190 | +£20 (+12%) |
| Rome, Club Europe | 44,000 | £30 | £40 | +£10 (+33%) |
| Amsterdam, Euro Traveller | 20,000 | £2 | £5 | +£3 (+150%) |
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that the Avios column is identical on both sides of the change. This was not a devaluation in the ordinary sense — your balance still buys the same number of seats, it just costs more money to collect them. The second is that the percentages are, on their own, close to meaningless. The route with the smallest percentage rise had the largest cash rise on the list. Rank the change by percentage and you get precisely the wrong answer about where it hurts.
The honest measure is the one almost nobody used: a redemption costs you Avios and cash. Value the Avios at a penny each and add the two together, and the New York booking went from £2,159 of value to £2,259 — a rise of under five per cent. Rome went up two per cent, Amsterdam one and a half. The 33 per cent headline was 33 per cent of the smaller half of the bill. You can redo any of these sums on our Avios valuation page.
The largest single rise we have seen reported was not on British Airways’ list at all: a Club World return to Sydney went from £775 to £998, which is £223 on one ticket. That figure comes from member reporting on the Head for Points forum rather than from British Airways, so treat it as indicative rather than confirmed.
Worth stating plainly, because a fortnight of headlines made it sound worse than it was.
Here is where this change stops being a routine fee rise and becomes something more specific. A British Airways American Express companion voucher discounts the Avios and does absolutely nothing to the cash. Two people fly, one person’s worth of Avios is deducted, and both passengers pay the taxes, fees and carrier surcharges in full. That is not a quirk — it is the central fact about the voucher. Which means the 27 May change lands on a voucher holder twice.
Club World to New York, two passengers, on a companion voucher
| Avios | Cash | Total at 1p per Avios | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before 27 May 2026 | 176,000 | £798 | £2,558 |
| After 27 May 2026 | 176,000 | £998 | £2,758 |
The cash moved by £100 per passenger, and a voucher booking is two passengers by definition, so the trip costs £200 more. An obvious objection: two people booking the same trip without a voucher also pay £200 more. Quite right — but they are spending 352,000 Avios to do it, and the voucher holder is spending 176,000. Put the same way for both:
Exactly double, and it stays double whatever you think an Avios is worth, because the ratio falls straight out of the structure: the voucher concentrates the same cash increase onto half as many Avios. Another way to see it — value your Avios at a penny each and look at the cash share of the trip. Before, £798 of cash inside a £2,558 outlay is 31 per cent cash. After, £998 inside £2,758 is 36 per cent. The voucher covers the points, and the points are a shrinking share of the bill. Every rise in the cash element makes a companion voucher slightly less useful than it was the day before, without British Airways ever touching the voucher’s terms.
None of which makes the voucher a bad benefit — on the New York example it still saves a couple 176,000 Avios for nothing, worth £1,760 at a penny each. But anyone deciding whether the £300 Premium Plus fee is worth paying should run the sum on today’s cash figures rather than the ones in a guide written in 2024. We go through that properly in the companion voucher guide, and the full breakdown of what you still pay is on the companion voucher surcharges page.
If the cash is the part your voucher cannot discount, the sensible response is to spend the voucher where the cash is smallest. Your British Airways companion voucher is valid on Iberia and Aer Lingus as well as British Airways, and both have historically charged considerably less than British Airways on transatlantic routes. This was a British Airways Reward Flight change; we have seen nothing to suggest Iberia and Aer Lingus moved their charges in step, though we have not been able to confirm that either way from a published source — so check the actual number at booking rather than taking our word for it.
If the gap is anything like what it was in the spring, routing a voucher redemption through Madrid or Dublin was already the single largest saving available to a voucher holder, and 27 May made it larger. Our guide to booking through Iberia to avoid BA surcharges walks through the routing in detail.
Taken on its own, 27 May was a modest change. Taken together with 15 December 2025, it is something else. December raised the Avios and left the cash largely alone. May raised the cash and left the Avios alone. Cover both in the same six months and you have raised the whole price of a redemption without ever announcing a price rise of that size.
| Return, one passenger | Before Dec 2025 | Today | Avios | Cash | Real cost at 1p |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, Club World | 160,000 + £375 | 176,000 + £499 | +10% | +33% | +14% |
| Cape Town, World Traveller | 60,000 + £150 | 66,000 + £190 | +10% | +27% | +13% |
| Rome, Club Europe | 40,000 + £25 | 44,000 + £40 | +10% | +60% | +13% |
| Amsterdam, Euro Traveller | 18,500 + £1 | 20,000 + £5 | +8% | +400% | +10% |
The last column is the one that matters, and it is remarkably consistent. Whatever the headline percentages did, the actual cost of a British Airways redemption went up by somewhere between ten and fourteen per cent in six months. Call it thirteen per cent as a working figure. For a couple travelling on a companion voucher, the same sum comes out at plus 17 per cent, for the reason set out above.
That is a real erosion, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. It is also not a catastrophe, and it is roughly in line with what most large loyalty programmes have done over the same period. What it changes is the maths on holding a very large balance: Avios you are not going to spend in the next couple of years are quietly losing value at something like ten to fifteen per cent a year, which is a good deal worse than leaving the money in a savings account. If you have a plan for them, fine. If you are collecting for the sake of collecting, that is now an expensive hobby. The full December picture is on our December 2025 devaluation analysis, and both changes sit side by side on the programme changes tracker.
Amsterdam, one way in Euro Traveller, went from a pound to two pounds fifty. That is the 150 per cent, and several outlets ran it. It is worth saying calmly that this does not matter. A short-haul Reward Flight Saver booking to Amsterdam still costs 10,000 Avios and less than the price of a coffee at the airport. The percentage is enormous because the base was almost zero.
Where short haul does matter is Club Europe, which went from £15 to £20 each way. On a family of four flying to Rome and back that is £40 of new cost — real money, though still small against what the same four seats would cost in cash. The general rule the figures support: look at the pounds, not the percentage, and look at them per person, then multiply by everyone travelling. That is a dull rule and it is right almost every time.
Two observations, offered as opinion rather than fact. The first is that raising the cash is a much easier change to make than raising the Avios. There is no award chart to republish, no comparison table for the blogs to screenshot, and the number people quote to each other — the 176,000 — stays reassuringly the same. It would be surprising if this were the last time that lever gets pulled.
The second is that the cash element is now large enough on premium long-haul redemptions that the comparison people should be running has changed. When a Club World return to New York costs 176,000 Avios and £499, the question is no longer “is this better than paying cash”, because it obviously is. The question is whether those 176,000 Avios would do more work somewhere else, and increasingly the honest answer is that a couple of Club Europe redemptions or a well-timed off-peak long haul in World Traveller Plus will return more value per Avios than the flagship redemption everybody dreams about. That is not a fashionable thing to say about Club World. It is what the arithmetic says.
Cash figures before and after are as reported by Head for Points on 22 May 2026 and cross-checked against LoyaltyLobby, The Points Guy and GB News. The Sydney figure comes from member reporting on the Head for Points forum rather than from British Airways.
Where we value an Avios at one penny we say so, and every sum here can be redone with a different figure. All prices are off-peak, subject to availability, and were correct when checked. Confirm on ba.com before you spend anything. Nothing here is financial advice. Last verified: 10 September 2026.
The AviosArcana Editorial Team
We decode UK air-miles programmes in plain English, cross-checking every figure against the programmes’ published terms. We are independent and this is general information, not financial advice.