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As regular readers of this blog will know I like to try out new aircraft and new premium cabins in the most cost effective way I can find. This usually involves booking flights on new aircraft while the airlines are testing them out on short-haul routes before letting them loose on the longer routes they were designed to fly.
That’s how I tested out the Finnair A350 Business Class cabin and, much more recently, the Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner Business Class cabin.
Last week Iberia finally announced its new Airbus A350’s Madrid – New York schedule as well as posting the schedule for when the aircraft will be flying “crew orientation flights” between Madrid and London.
B3166 MAD 15:55 – 17:20 LHR (Daily)
IB6252 LHR 18:50 – 22:15 MAD (Daily)
This was too good an opportunity to miss so, as my Avios balance is held with British Airways, I headed over to BA.com to see what award availability was like.
Booking The Iberia A350 Business Class Cabin
What I wanted:
- To avoid having to stay in Madrid overnight
- To balance out the use of Avios with the use of cash – while I never want to use more cash than I have to I also don’t want to redeem Avios at a bad rate as I don’t have a very large number of Avios in my account.
To meet those requirements this is what I decided to do:
- Use cash to book an Economy Class fare from London to Madrid
- Use Avios to book the Iberia A350 Business Class for the Madrid – London sector
Had I wanted to just use cash the price of this itinerary would have been £472.40 (~$660) and that’s way too much to be spending on a short-haul TFM trip.
Using a combination of cash and Avios was the plan.
Things didn’t start well when BA.com refused to offer me ANY Iberia flights when I searched for award availability on the one day I’m free to do this trip.
The award availability was there (I checked Iberia.com)….
……but BA only wanted to show me British Airways operated flights and, for reasons I’ll never understand, three ridiculous routings involving Air Nostrum.
Why would BA think I’d like to take 6 hours 20 minutes to get from Madrid to London?
Still, this is the British Airways website so I really shouldn’t have been surprised that it was acting up….and the website didn’t let up.
With BA.com denying the existence of any Iberia flights between Madrid and London I decided to move some Avios across to Iberia Plus and book direct with Iberia.
This should have been simple enough to do but, once again, BA.com decided not to work and the “combine your Avios” function kept on giving me an error message.
Arrrrghhhhh!!!
I have absolutely no Avios in my Iberia Plus account (why would I?) so, with BA refusing to let me move any Avios across from my Executive Club account, I had to get the Avios from somewhere else.
Amex Membership Rewards and Chase Ultimate Rewards both transfer over to Iberia Plus at a ratio of 1:1 and I have reasonable balances of both…but Chase was the obvious place to start.
Chase Ultimate Rewards points transfer over to Iberia Plus instantaneously while Amex transfers can take up to 48 hours and, as I didn’t know how long award availability would last, I decided that Chase was the way to go.
Before I transferred over any points to Iberia Plus I decided to confirm how many Avios I would need to book the A350 Business Class cabin (I didn’t want to transfer over more Ultimate Rewards Points that I needed to)….and this is where I got a surprise.
As I expected, Iberia Plus priced the one way Business Class award at 15,000 Avios + taxes….but it also offered me a number of Avios + cash options that I wasn’t expecting:
Normally I automatically disregard any cash + points options that come up (I rarely find them to be of much use) but on this occasion I did some math.
This is what the match showed me:
- 12,750 Avios + £42.10 = buying 2,250 Avios at £0.011 or ~$0.0156 each
- 9,750 Avios + £62.10 = buying 5,250 Avios at £0.0086 or ~$0.0120 each
- 7,500 Avios + £82.10 = buying 7,500 Avios at £0.0087 or ~$0.0120 each
- 5,250 Avios + £107.10 = buying 9,750 Avios at £0.0092 or ~$0.0129 each
- 3,000 Avios + £122.10 = buying 12,000 Avios at £0.00875 or ~$0.0123 each
Wow!
Iberia Plus was offering to sell me Avios for less than I value Chase Ultimate Rewards Points ($0.015).
I’d have to be crazy to transfer in more Chase Ultimate Rewards points than I absolutely had to so I transferred over the bare minimum – 3,000 points.
The Avios hit my account within seconds, I went ahead with the booking….
…and I chose my seat in the empty cabin:
All that was left to do was was to book the outbound flight to Madrid (which I did for £77.30/~$108)….
…and reserve an exit row seat to avoid the knee-crushing seat pitch on Iberia’s short haul aircraft:
Why This Was Such A Good Deal
The fact that I purchased Avios for £0.00875 (~$0.0123) was a good deal in its own right but, when you take a look at what redemption rate I ended up getting, it looks even better.
My total outlay for this trip is as follows:
- Iberia A350 Business Class – £122.10 + 3,000 Avios/Ultimate Rewards Points
- Short-haul Economy Class – £77.30
That’s a total outlay of £199.40 (~$280) + 3,000 Avios/Ultimate Rewards Points
Towards the beginning of this post I noted that the cheapest cash fare for this routing was £472.40 (~$660) so my 3,000 Avios/Ultimate rewards points saved me £273 (~$380).
That’s an incredible £0.091 ($0.127) of value out of every Avios/Ultimate Rewards point I used – I think that’s the best redemption rate I’ve ever managed to book!
Bottom Line
As someone who writes aircraft/cabin reviews, I was always going to have to try this cabin out, so it’s not like I had the option of simply not flying on this trip – one way or another I had to book the A350 while it’s flying short-haul or risk having to spend even more when it’s flying long-haul.
The 3,000 Avios/Ultimate Rewards points really did save me £273 (~$380).
I’m happy that I’m going to get to try out the Iberia A350 Business Class cabin without having to find a good long-haul Business Class fare (or burn a lot of Avios/AAdvantage Miles), but I’m delighted that I got such good value out of the 3,000 Ultimate Rewards points I used.
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