This newsletter is coming to you nearly 12 hours after it was supposed to go out. Sorry to those of you who like to start your day with a little travel talk! I think there was some kind of glitch with the scheduled post. Anyway, here’s what you should have gotten this morning.
Good morning! This is the long-awaited Avion explainer. I have a few small bits to get out of the way before I get into that, so let’s dive right in.
Reminder - Amex Cobalt Elevated Bonus
This is a pretty RBC-heavy post, but I wanted to quickly highlight that the elevated welcome bonus for the Amex Cobalt, which is one of my all-time favourite Canadian credit cards for earning points to use for travel, is ending soon (Jan 28). If you want to jump on it, you can use this link to earn that elevated bonus. It is a referral link, so I earn points when you use it, and you will also earn 9,000 more points than you would if you signed up with the public offer. Thanks in advance if you use it!
Travel Deal - Triple Points and 25% Off
If you’re an RBC credit card holder, they are currently offering triple points earning and up to 25% off on select hotels when you book through the Avion portal. So if, for example, you hold an Avion Visa Infinite, which earns 1.25 points/dollar on travel, and you booked 2 nights at this hotel in Rome, you could earn over 2,000 Avion points on that booking, which is not a bad return on $600! Check it out here and book by February 10.
Now, this week my main topic is Avion, one of my favourite rewards programs. I also know some of my readers have large stashes of them, so read on if that’s you! It can be a little tricky to wrap your head around at first, but with a little extra legwork, you can squeeze a lot of value out of these points.
Types of Avion Points
The first thing to know is that there are actually three types of Avion points: Avion Select, Avion Premium, and Avion Elite. Avion Premium and Elite points can only be earned by RBC credit card holders, while Avion Select points can actually be earned by anyone. Just create an account and you can start earning points and taking advantage of deals and partnerships with merchants like Rexall, Metro, Lyft, and more. If you aren’t sure what kind you have, you can log into Avion and see what it says in the top right corner.
For the purposes of this explanation, I’m going to focus on Avion Premium, which are the easiest to earn with everyday spending, and Avion Elite, which have the most possible upside in terms of redemption value, and I’ll also tell you how to combine them.
Earning
Earning Avion points is quite straightforward. Avion Premium points can be earned on the RBC Ion and Ion+ Visa credit cards. The Ion+ is arguably the superior card here; it costs $48 a year and earns 3 points per dollar on select categories such as groceries, gas, transit, and dining. Meanwhile, Avion Elite points can be earned on the RBC Avion Visa Platinum, Visa Infinite, and Visa Infinite Privilege cards. The Visa Infinite is their flagship card, and it usually has a generous welcome bonus of 35-55,000 points, but it’s not a great earner: 1.25 points per dollar on travel and 1 point per dollar on everything else.
Redeeming
To illustrate the power of Avion Elite points for travel, I’m going to use a hypothetical round trip ticket from Toronto to London on British Airways. On the BA website, it’s going for a little over $1100.
Avion Premium
Avion Premium points can be redeemed for travel through the Avion portal at a rate of 172 points = $1 (or 1 point = 0.5 cents). This can be flights, hotels, rental cars, vacation packages, or even activities. It’s far from the maximum possible value of Avion points, but it’s a solid, reliable option and easy to execute. Premium points can also be converted into WestJet Dollars at a rate of 100 points = 1 WJD. This is sometimes an OK value proposition, but note that WJD are applied against the cash price, which typically gets you less value than a true award flight, and you can only apply them to the base fare, so you still have to pay any surcharges, taxes, and fees.
When I look for this BA flight using my Avion Premium points, I get this:
As I mentioned, Premium points are redeemed in the portal at a rate of 0.5 cents per point, so I would need nearly 200,000 points to book this particular flight, which is outrageous for almost any flight anywhere in any class, so let’s move on.
Avion Elite
Avion Elite points are the more valuable type. Like Premium points, they can be redeemed through the Avion portal and transferred to WestJet at 100 points = 1 WJD. However, the redemption value in the portal is better, at 100 points = $1. You can also redeem your points through the Air Travel Redemption Schedule, which allows you to redeem a fixed number of points for a flight depending on the origin and destination up to a threshold of base fare. Most importantly, they can be transferred out to British Airways and Cathay Pacific at a 1:1 ratio, and to American Airlines at a 1:0.7 ratio. This flexibility massively increases their value, because it allows you to book true award flights, rather than effectively using your points as a purchase eraser through the portal.
Let’s go back to the example British Airways flight. When I look at booking it through the Avion portal under my Elite account, I get this:
Eagle eyed readers may have noticed that this works out to a rate of 1.5 cents per point, not 1 cent per point as I stated above; this is because my Avion card actually used to be an HSBC credit card before they merged with RBC last year, and as part of the terms of that conversion, I get an elevated redemption rate. For most Avion cardholders, this would cost 115,100 points. Again, I’d consider this a little steep for all but the most aspirational long-haul business class tickets. This highlights one of the main downsides to booking with points through a portal: the points price is tied to the cash price. Because the cash price of this ticket is fairly high, you would need a lot of points to book it through the portal.
However, let’s say I booked this flight on points directly through British Airways. BA charges a fixed number of points for award tickets based on flight distance, so this isn’t subject to price fluctuations thanks to seasonal demand or other factors (they do have peak and off-peak pricing, but the difference isn’t huge).
Since Avion points transfer to BA at a 1:1 ratio, you could more than halve the number of points required to book the exact same flights by transferring to BA instead of booking through the portal. If you factor in the fact that Avion pretty reliably offers transfer bonuses of up to 30% to BA once or twice a year, you could book this trip for as little as 38,462 Avion points.
Combining Avion Points
Finally, let’s talk about how to combine your Premium and Elite points. If you have one type of Avion points, and you have an account that earns another type, you can instantly and freely move them between your accounts at a 1:1 ratio.
However, it’s important to note that you cannot convert points to a type that you cannot otherwise earn. So, for example, if you have two accounts that earn Avion Premium points, you cannot turn those into Avion Elite points unless you also have an account that itself earns Elite points.
However, this means that if, for example, you hold the Ion+ Visa and the Avion Visa Infinite, you can use the former to earn and the latter to redeem. Let’s say you spend $1000 combined on bonus categories (groceries, gas, dining, etc.). At 3 points/dollar, that’s 3,000 points per month on your Ion+ account. Let’s say you also spend $300 a month on other miscellaneous expenses, and you put those on your Avion Visa Infinite at 1 point/dollar. After a year, you’d have 36,000 Avion Premium points and 3,600 Avion Elite points. You could instantly transfer those Premium points to Elite points for a total of 39,600 Elite points, and if you time it with a transfer bonus, that’s enough to book a round trip ticket to London!
If you made it this far, I hope this was helpful and relatively clear. Feel free to reach out if I can clarify any of the above; I know it’s a lot to take in! You can reply to this email, or DM me on Instagram @pointsnpennies. I’m a little short on Avion points at the moment, so probably won’t be sharing any of my own booking successes with them anytime soon, but if you use them for something good, I’d love to hear about it!
Do you happen to know why someone would see a different points-price for the exact same thing (example, a hotel stay) as you? I'm running in to something where it seems like a price should be X based on someone checking travel that we are coordinating, but when I go to book it the price is vastly different for me than them.