On 28th May 2026, Cazzy and I flew British Airways First Class from London Heathrow to Washington Dulles.
I still can't believe I finally get to type that sentence!
We paid 88,000 Avios, £1,205.08 in taxes, fees and charges, and used one British Airways American Express Premium Plus Companion Voucher.
That works out at £602.54 each in cash.
For that, we got the full experience.
And, for a few hours at least, the feeling that we had somehow cheated the system.
It was bloody brilliant.
Note: Below is not any sort of financial advice. It is simply taking you through exactly how we built up points over the years and used them to redeem our first ever First Class flights. I hope you find it useful but it is not necessarily recommending you do the exact same thing.
This was not one of those wonderfully simple stories where we opened a credit card, bought our weekly shop and then magically found ourselves sipping champagne at 35,000 feet.
We had spent roughly three years collecting points and not yet redeemed any.
Note: We still have more than 200,000 points left after this flight. So don’t worry, it doesn’t take 3 years to get the points needed.
Also, finding the flight itself took around four hours of searching, spread across several days. The British Airways website repeatedly glitched or crashed. New York, the place we actually needed to reach, had no reward options we liked.
Then Washington appeared.
And the decision to spend more than £1,200 on a one-way flight was made while Cazzy and I were sitting in a hot tub saying, essentially, “F*ck it. When are we ever going to do this again?”
This is exactly how it happened.
We booked the flights in February 2026, roughly three months before departure.
At the time, BA displayed a one-way cash First Class fare from roughly £9,330.
However, I do not seriously claim that we “saved” more than £8,000. We would never have paid £9,330 for those tickets, and First Class return fares were weirdly much cheaper than one-way fares.
The comparison that actually mattered to us was far simpler.
Standard one-way economy flights were around £500 each. Would we pay roughly £100 more each to fly First Class instead?
Hell yeah.
At the time of booking, we had built up roughly 300,000 Avios, multiple Barclays cabin upgrade vouchers and two BA Amex Companion Vouchers.
We had accumulated them over around three years using the following Avios rewards cards:
Some points came from ordinary card spending.
Some points came from welcome bonuses.
Some came from paying for premium cards for a few months to unlock a larger bonus or voucher, then moving back onto a free card.
And a meaningful chunk came from business spending through our Capital on Tap card, because travel and running this website naturally create business expenses.
We were also spending more than usual during part of this period because we bought a boat and fitted it out.
So no, I am not going to pretend that every couple can collect 300,000 Avios in three years without thinking about it.
How quickly you can build a balance depends heavily on your normal expenditure, whether you have eligible business spending, which welcome bonuses you qualify for and whether you are collecting alone or with someone else.
But I do think getting to 200,000 or 300,000 Avios between two people over a few years is much more achievable than it first sounds.
Especially once you make one crucial mindset shift.
Before getting into using points cards, most of our day-to-day spending simply left our debit accounts (like most people).
Afterwards, almost everything possible went through a rewards card first.
Food shopping. Fuel. Bills. Travel bookings. Business expenses. Everyday purchases.
When travelling abroad, we often used a Curve card linked to a Barclaycard Avios card, including for personal spending such as meals and souvenirs. That meant we could continue collecting without using the Amex where it was not accepted.
The point was never to buy things purely for Avios.
It was to make sure that, whenever we spent money anyway, we earned something from it.
It becomes a strangely fun and slightly addictive hobby.
Every relative of ours who has started collecting points has gone through the same shift. You suddenly notice every payment that could have earned something but did not.
That does not mean every points offer is worthwhile.
You can sometimes earn extra points by booking a flight or hotel through a specific portal, for example. But if the same booking costs more there, you may be worse off overall.
We never paid more for a hotel simply to earn a few extra Avios.
We also never bought Avios outright.
In fact, we sometimes timed things terribly. I took out Amex Gold when the welcome bonus was around 20,000 points, then watched them offer roughly double that about a month later.
That was painful.
I cannot stress this enough.
We pay our credit card balances in full every month by Direct Debit.
Our spending habits did not change. The money simply stopped leaving our bank account at the moment of purchase and left when the card balance was paid.
Rewards cards can have horrendous interest rates. If you start carrying a balance and paying interest, you can quickly wipe out the entire value of the points and vouchers.
The banks obviously hope that some people will do exactly that.
If you cannot confidently pay the balance in full each month, collecting Avios through credit cards is probably not worth doing.
This article explains what worked for us. It is not financial advice, and bonuses, fees, eligibility rules, refund policies and voucher thresholds change regularly. Always check the current official terms before applying for anything.
The £1,205.08 was the amount charged by British Airways for the flights.
It was not the complete lifetime cost of collecting all our Avios and vouchers.
Between us, we paid for roughly:
Beyond that, we mainly used free cards.
At the time, Barclaycard Avios Plus cost us £20 per month. The BA Premium Plus fee was charged annually, but we received a partial refund after downgrading.
American Express currently says cardholders may be eligible for a pro-rata refund depending on account usage, but this is exactly the kind of rule you must check directly with Amex before relying on it.
It would also be misleading to dump every penny of those card fees onto this one flight.
The cards helped us create a much larger balance and several vouchers. Even after spending 88,000 Avios on Washington, we still had hundreds of thousands of points and unused vouchers for future trips.
We effectively paid some money to accelerate our collecting.
Then we mentally treated those points and vouchers as already paid for and moved on.
Rewards cards are intimidating when you first start.
I had this exact conversation with my brother when he was choosing his first one.
At the time, the rough options we were discussing looked like this:
Those were the figures available when we had the conversation. Treat them as an example of the logic, not a promise of what you will receive today.
The paid card looks terrible if you simply compare a £300 annual fee with 30,000 Avios.
Using our rough 1p-per-Avios target, those points are worth around £300. On the face of it, you have gained nothing.
But if you legitimately meet the spending target in three months, receive the bonus and are then eligible to downgrade with a partial fee refund, your actual card cost may be closer to three months of the annual fee.
In that simplified example, £75 could unlock around 30,000 Avios.
We sometimes kept a premium card slightly longer because we were already well on the way towards its Companion or Cabin Upgrade voucher. Once we earned what we were targeting, we moved back to the free version.
We used similar logic with Barclaycard Avios Plus. We paid the monthly fee while pursuing its bonus and cabin upgrade voucher, then downgraded.
This is not a recommendation to copy that exact sequence today.
Welcome bonuses, eligibility, annual fees, refund rules and spending thresholds change. Check every figure before applying, and never invent extra spending just to chase a reward.
The UK also has far fewer opportunities than the United States. Americans seem able to cycle endlessly through rewards cards from different banks.
Here, you eventually run out of worthwhile welcome bonuses and must wait for eligibility periods to reset.
For several Amex welcome bonuses, that means waiting until 24 months after cancelling the relevant card, although which previous cards disqualify you depends on the exact product. This is another rule to check carefully before applying. You do not want to pay a fee, hit a large spending target and then discover you were never eligible for the bonus.
We still have roughly 240,000 Avios ready to use, and Cazzy has a Barclaycard Avios Plus welcome bonus left to pursue. Beyond that, rebuilding will be slower unless we generate referrals or new offers appear.
We have always used 1p per Avios as a simple decision-making benchmark.
If a redemption gives us substantially less than 1p per Avios, it probably is not very exciting. If it gives us considerably more, it starts to look attractive.
In our heads, we have always said that 1p was the guaranteed worst-case value because Avios could be converted into Nectar points and spent at Sainsbury's.
That was wrong.
Under the current exchange, 400 Avios converts to 400 Nectar points, while 500 Nectar points is worth £2.50 at Sainsbury's.
That creates a current fallback value of roughly 0.5p per Avios, not 1p.
So where did the 1p idea come from?
It is a widely used target valuation for travel redemptions, not guaranteed cash value.
There are a lot of people far more experienced about points redemptions than me who use this logic. Here's an example of a great article to read.
This is the part that the glossy rewards adverts conveniently skip.
It is all well and good saying:
"Use this card for your shopping and, before you know it, you will be flying Business or First Class."
In reality, reward flights are restrictive.
Flexibility is crucial.
We had already booked a transatlantic cruise from New York back to the UK. All we needed was a flight from London to New York before it departed.
Easy, right?
Except there were absolutely no New York reward flights that felt worth booking.
So I began searching airports within roughly a three-hour flight, train journey or drive of New York.
That opened up Washington, Chicago, and Houston. I also looked at Las Vegas as, well, we LOVE LAS VEGAS!
Washington eventually appeared as one of the few routes offering First Class on dates that worked for us.
It also solved several other problems at once.
The route became part of the trip, not an inconvenient points stunt.
Read more: Our 3 day Washington DC itinerary
If we were finally going to use a Companion Voucher for First, we wanted it to feel legitimate.
For us, that meant:
That final point matters.
Do not build your entire plan around a sentence like, “We are definitely honeymooning in Hawaii in two years and flying First Class.”
You may eventually discover that BA does not operate the route you imagined, First is not offered, no reward seats exist on your dates or the taxes make the redemption feel pointless.
Collect with a goal, but stay patient and flexible about how you reach it.
We had the same points and vouchers when we flew to Orlando in October 2025.
We could have forced ourselves to cash them in simply because they were there.
But the combination of timing, aircraft, availability and charges did not feel worthwhile. We would have burned hard-earned vouchers and still paid substantial taxes for a relatively small saving.
Instead, we paid a very similar amount to fly return with Virgin Atlantic and experienced one of its newer aircraft.
That felt like the better outcome.
Using a voucher is not automatically good value. Sometimes the smartest redemption is no redemption at all.
I did not use an automated reward-seat alert service.
I did this the slow way.
I logged into my British Airways Club account, clicked Membership, opened Member vouchers, selected Redeem beside the Companion Voucher and then used the Book with Avios tab.
I entered two passengers, selected a one-way journey and began testing destinations and dates.
I also compared our Barclays cabin upgrade vouchers separately through the Book and upgrade tab.
The reward flights and general deals were often very similar. The Companion Voucher simply produced better value for the booking we eventually chose.
Then came hours of going backwards and forwards.
The BA website is terrible for this. It glitches, freezes and makes side-by-side comparisons far harder than they need to be.
My biggest practical tip is to save every promising result as soon as you see it. Take screenshots or keep a simple note with the route, cabin, Avios, cash cost, date and voucher used.
Do not assume you will easily return to the same screen later.
British Airways now has official information on booking Reward Flights with Avios, but the first proper search still involves a lot of playing around and learning by doing.
Honestly, those four hours taught me more than any beginner's guide could.
When we search for future reward flights, I feel much better equipped to understand the compromises, spot the better combinations and move quickly when something useful appears.
We had meant to make the booking before BA increased the Avios required for the redemption.
But we delayed, eventually booked in February, and ended up spending roughly 20,000 more Avios than we would have under the earlier pricing.
Using our 1p target, that felt like losing around £200 of value.
It was annoying.
But there was a strange upside.
Had we booked at the earlier point, we probably would have chosen Economy because we had not yet properly considered using the voucher for First.
The delay cost us Avios, but it also gave us time to explore the system, rethink the trip and find the experience we actually wanted.
Finding “First Class” was not enough.
BA has operated different versions of its First cabin, and some are much more modern than others.
I had read guides suggesting older First Class aircraft sometimes served Washington, so we checked our exact flight separately through BA's normal cash-booking search.
That showed the aircraft scheduled for the route, along with its cabins and seat information.
Our flight was due to use an updated Boeing 777-300ER.
Aircraft can always be swapped before departure, so nothing is completely guaranteed. But it was enough reassurance for us to continue.
You can check all of the proper seat configurations of BA's fleet here.
These are the totals we recorded for two people, after applying whichever Companion Voucher or cabin upgrade voucher we were testing at that point.
They are not a perfectly controlled comparison. Some used different vouchers, cabins and Avios-and-cash combinations.
That is the point.
This was our messy real-world shortlist, not a laboratory test. Note, prices and points redemptions typically go up over time so these may not be accurate anymore.
Long story short ... New York had no First Class option on the flights we were considering.
We had originally leaned towards its 30,000 Avios plus £100 Economy option. Weirdly, Business did not feel compelling enough for the aircraft and experience involved.
Washington DC Business was particularly interesting because it required more Avios but £806.08 less cash than First.
And that is probably the option we would choose now.
But at the time, First somehow made sense.
We already had the points. The Companion Voucher brought the Avios requirement down. The correct aircraft was scheduled. We would get the First Wing and Concorde Room. Washington was somewhere we wanted to visit.
Everything clicked.
Cazzy and I did not make the decision while sitting sensibly at a desk with a spreadsheet.
We were in a hot tub.
We had spent days going backwards and forwards, gradually building a route and talking through the cost.
Then we had a wonderfully irresponsible-sounding but actually quite rational “screw it” moment.
Yes, £1,205 was a lot of money for us.
But the points and voucher had already been collected. They were sitting there waiting to be used. A normal one-way Economy flight was around £500 each anyway.
So the question became:
Would we pay roughly £600 each for a proper British Airways First Class experience when an ordinary Economy ticket could cost around £500 each?
The answer was an immediate.
Hells yeah.
We were giddy when we booked it.
We became even more excited afterwards when we selected our seats and started inspecting every part of the booking.
One of my favourite moments was opening the upgrade section and seeing:
No upgrade options available.
Hah.
There was literally nowhere higher to go.
Ours came from the British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card.
That distinction matters because the free BA Amex Companion Voucher is restricted to Economy, whereas a Premium Plus voucher can be used in any cabin, including First.
Our voucher was more than a year old when we used it and was due to expire in 2027.
I cannot now reconstruct the exact spending threshold that triggered it, and I do not want to pretend otherwise.
What I can correct is my initial memory that the Premium Plus threshold used to be £12,000. Before November 2024, the old Premium Plus threshold was £10,000, while £12,000 applied to the free card. Which? documented that 2024 change here. The current published threshold is £15,000 on either card.
The official BA Amex card page shows the current fees, welcome bonuses and thresholds. Check it before making any decision, because these figures can and do change.
Cazzy's and my BA accounts are linked through a Household Account. Meaning if you collect alongside a partner or family member at the same address, this is worth considering.
Our Avios still belong to us individually, but the household setup makes it easier to see and use the combined balance. It also helps us keep track of our vouchers and which ones expire first.
It removed some of the friction from planning a redemption involving points earned by both of us.
BA explains the full rules for Household Accounts here.
Once the booking was confirmed, we obviously told our family we were flying First Class.
It felt like a massive brag.
So every time we mentioned it, we immediately launched into a defensive explanation about points, vouchers and how we had not paid the normal cash fare.
Until then, some of our relatives did not really understand why we bothered with rewards cards.
Seeing the actual result changed that.
My stepmum and brother both applied for rewards cards the following week.
Now they get it!
Our reward-flight plan depended on travelling from Washington to New York for the cruise.
We booked Amtrak.
Then, roughly one hour before departure, Amtrak cancelled our train.
We had to hire a car at the last minute and drive to New York.
We reached the cruise terminal with minutes to spare and were the second-to-last people to board.
In hindsight, going to New York the night before would have been the sensible decision.
It was stupidly tight.
Our 3 days in Washington DC were excellent. Leaving the transfer until embarkation day was not.
Hell yes.
We paid around £602 each in cash for something we will probably experience only a handful of times in our lives.
We were in a position to do it, and I am glad we seized the opportunity.
The complete First Class journey, from entering the private First Wing to sitting in the Concorde Room and finally settling into the cabin, made it feel like far more than a slightly better aeroplane seat.
You can read our full British Airways First Class review here.
That review explains the seat, food, service, lounge and whether BA First actually lived up to the excitement.
The short version is that I would absolutely do it again if money were no issue.
But money is an issue.
We are in that middle ground where we can occasionally afford something ridiculous, but the extra cash still matters.
Now that we have flown First once, I do not think the jump from Business to First will usually justify a much larger cash payment for us.
Honestly, almost nothing about this booking.
Washington fitted the trip beautifully. The First Class experience was memorable. The one-way cruise itinerary made the voucher unusually useful.
The only obvious mistake was not travelling to New York the night before the cruise.
For future redemptions, though, our priorities have changed.
We will probably spend more Avios and less cash to fly Business Class, rather than paying the premium for First again.
Washington Business would have cost us 99,000 Avios plus £399 for two. Compared with what we booked, that was only 11,000 more Avios but more than £800 less in cash.
Before flying First, the emotional value of doing it once made the extra cash worthwhile.
Now that we have done it, the maths feels different.
Plus the fact that there are 3 BA Business airport lounges in Heathrow. And we're all about trying new things. Flying Buisness gives us a reason to do these rather than returning to Concorde.
We would also happily pay a little more to try a first class flight on another airline, ideally one of the Middle Eastern carriers we have heard so much about.
Otherwise, we will use our points wherever they create the biggest meaningful saving. That might be Business. It might be Premium Economy. It could even be Economy if it saves us a tonne of money on a trip we already want to take.
The best redemption is not automatically the fanciest cabin.
If I had to reduce the whole experience to a few lessons, they would be these:
New York did not work, so we searched nearby cities. Washington transformed the flight and gave us an extra trip we genuinely loved.
Start exploring routes and learning the search system early. Reward availability does not care about the perfect fixed plan in your head.
The BA website crashes. Take screenshots and keep notes so you can compare routes, dates, cabins, aircraft and vouchers side by side.
The lowest Avios option is not automatically the best deal. Neither is the most luxurious cabin.
BA First is not identical across every plane. Look at the normal cash flight listing and seat map, while remembering that aircraft swaps can happen.
We skipped using our vouchers for Orlando because the saving and experience were not good enough. That patience helped us find Washington later.
Look at the fee, realistic spend, welcome bonus, voucher, eligibility rules and downgrade or refund terms together. Never rely on figures from an old article, including this one.
This entire strategy falls apart if you pay credit-card interest.
Nobody cared about our explanations until they saw two First Class tickets sitting in the BA app.
It took me about four hours and a lot of swearing. But I now understand the system far better and feel much more confident searching next time.
We did not book BA First Class because it was the mathematically perfect use of every Avios.
We booked it because enough things lined up at once.
We had the points. We had the right Companion Voucher. Washington worked for the wider journey. The flight had the First cabin we wanted. The full Heathrow experience was included. And the cash price, while still substantial, felt just close enough to an ordinary one-way Economy fare to make us say yes.
That is the bit that can disappear when people reduce points collecting to spreadsheets.
The objective is not to die with the world's most efficiently valued pile of Avios. It is to use them for experiences that genuinely feel worthwhile.
For us, this one absolutely did.
And seeing “no upgrade options available” in the app still makes me laugh.
I’m going to be releasing more guides about how we build Avios here in the UK and to help you do the same!
Check out these other guides here:
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