British Airways Avios Availability – January 2023

One of the biggest challenges I hear when talking to people about their travel options is finding reward availability. In this article, we’ll look at British Airways Avios availability for the coming year

This report covers Long Haul flights from both London Heathrow and London Gatwick. It also includes the BA City Flyer routes from London City airport.

You can find last month’s report here, for comparison.

At the time we gathered the data, British Airways had roughly 2,567,978 seats available for Avios redemptions.

Economy has by far the highest availability (as to be expected).

As usual, there are some swing factors in the report. European destinations sometimes have 6+ flights per day, which means a very large number of seats to those destinations throughout the year.

We’ve also included a split between London Heathrow and London Gatwick destinations this month.

The split per type shows exactly how much is in each category of flight we tracked. You can barely see the tiny slice that represents the barely 7100 First Class Avios seats.

The below chart shows the split between domestic availability in Economy and Business.

For most routes, it’s roughly evenly split across the two cabins, which makes sense given the large number of flights.

There are domestic routes to London Heathrow, London City and London Gatwick. So we’ve summed the total for any routes that flew to multiple London airports.

The below chart shows the top 10 routes for First Class availability.

The numbers are higher than last month’s report. This reflects the fact that First Class Avios seats are dynamic, meaning they’re only available on flights where First isn’t filled with passengers paying with cash.

Most of BA’s fleet doesn’t have a First Class cabin either, meaning the number of routes with First offered is low in comparison to Business.

1. Boston – 1,230
2. Washington DC – 1,128
3. Bahrain – 729
4. Chicago – 716
5. Philadelphia – 652
6. Houston – 591
7. Atlanta – 512
8. Los Angeles – 263
9. Dallas Fort Worth – 216
10. New York – 185

The below chart shows the top 10 routes for Long Haul Business Class availability.

1. New York – 22,681
2. Boston – 8,611
3. Washington DC – 7,028
4. Toronto – 5,981
5. Houston – 4,617
6. Chicago – 4,562
7. Mumbai – 3,859
8. Montreal – 3,799
9. Bahrain – 3,727
10. Accra – 3,007

The below chart shows the top 10 routes for Long Haul Premium Economy availability.

1. New York – 25,811
2. Boston – 8,840
3. Washington DC – 6,984
4. Dubai – 5,232
5. Houston – 4,746
6. Bahrain – 4,712
7. Chicago – 4,562
8. Los Angeles – 4,248
9. Doha – 4,170
10. Toronto – 4,118

The below chart shows the top 10 routes for Long Haul Economy availability.

Economy usually isn’t great value for Long Haul redemptions due to the high taxes & fees. Bear that in mind.

1. New York – 31,217
2. Boston – 14,021
3. Mumbai – 10,984
4. Los Angeles – 10,109
5. Washington DC – 9,988
6. Houston – 9,215
7. Johannesburg – 7,757
8. Chicago – 7,632
9. Toronto – 7,232
10. Delhi – 7,160

The below chart shows the London Heathrow routes with the worst availability for total number of seats.

1. Doha – 1,481
2. Punta Cana – 1,266
3. Male – 1,210
4. Vancouver – 1,104
5. Bridgetown -997
6. Sydney – 803
7. Tokyo – 626
8. Mauritius – 549
9. San Jose – 511
10. Cape Town – 334

The below chart shows the top 10 short haul routes for Economy availability.

1. Amsterdam – 34,468
2. Geneva – 30,939
3. Dublin – 28,202
4. Barcelona – 26,568
5. Berlin – 24,671
6. Nice – 24,519
7. Frankfurt – 23,634
8. Munich – 23,156
9. Brussels – 23,066
10. Copenhagen – 22,986

The below chart shows the top 10 short haul routes for Business availability.

1. Amsterdam – 23,776
2. Geneva – 23,170
3. Barcelona – 21,902
4. Dublin – 21,214
5. Nice – 18,137
6. Stockholm – 17,831
7. Copenhagen – 17,565
8. Frankfurt – 17,311
9. Munich – 17,158
10. Zurich – 16,902

Some notes about what we collected:

• New York often skews the data due to the disproportionate amount of flights per day to JFK compared to other routes.
• Long Haul routes are both London Heathrow and London Gatwick
• No codeshare or partner flights are counted.
• Any data for Sydney is a combination of both Singapore and Sydney data due to it being two flights.
• Data was anonymously collected within the last 7 days.
• Numbers are not real-time.

This data clearly shows that there are tons of reward seats. Your main challenge when spending points is your ability to be flexible on route and date.

We’ll be doing more of these reports going forward, if you wish to see specific data please feel free to contact us.