How to Avoid Big Fuel Surcharges Redeeming British Airways Points Across the Atlantic

If you have an Iberia frequent flyer account, if it’s three months old, and if you have earned any miles in that account then you can save on fuel surcharges — because you can transfer British Airways points over to Iberia, and then redeem the points for travel on Iberia. Fuel surcharges are miniscule compared to what British Airways would charge for the same thing.

Here’s why fuel surcharges are a big deal, and how having an Iberia account can save you.

You need an Iberia account, and you need that account to have miles in it. Here are free Iberia points to make that happen.

Open an Iberia account now, it can’t hurt to have one.

Last week I wrote about this opportunity to drop 50 points into your account.

Fortunately that’s not the only way to do it, and it’s worth earning points from more than once source, then you don’t have to worry as much about the points actually posting.

Iberia’s ‘Summer Flights’ promotion is giving away 600 free flights also gives out 50 free miles for entering.

How easy is it to earn the points? This easy:

As I wrote last week,

50 points. Your new Iberia account will be active. And once it’s 3 months old you can perform “the trick” to save hundreds of dollars leveraging your British Airways points to fly award tickets on Spanish airline and oneworld member (owned by the same parent company as BA) Iberia.

This isn’t the only way to avoid fuel surcharges redeeming BA points across the Atlantic of course. You can also redeem for Air Berlin flights which do not carry fuel surcharges, or you can redeem for Aer Lingus flights where fuel surcharges are especially low.

(HT: Malta Points)


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. how much availability does IB puts out, when I search on BA, most of the time BA flights show up and not the other two. hate to transfer over and not having any award seats

  2. Hi, Thank you for the great post! I registered only today, so could you please check me the date 6 NOV LHR-MIA first, 19 NOV MIA-LHR business and inform me how much does the taxes and fees cost? I see 883 USD and if after 3 month will be less, I can wait.

  3. The link didn’t work for me in Chrome when I was logged into my Iberia account, but it did work in Firefox when I wasn’t. 🙂

  4. Anyone know how to recover your old Iberia number if you can’t find it?

    I can’t find my card anywhere in my house and none of my saved emails have it. And Iberia won’t let you recover it online, at least not that I can find. I’ve had the account for over 3 months so would love to plop these 50 points in there to keep the miles transfer option open.

  5. how long does it take for the avios to post, it seems i finally got by the bad certificate issue, but my account still say 0000.

  6. I too wonder how long the miles take to post. I forgot I had an Iberia account so I opened one and “got” the 50 miles though they have not posted. I then found that I did have an account I opened in 2013, “got” the miles again. Neither account has any miles posted. It has been 3 days. No big deal, but curious.

  7. followup: try using a different browser or incognito window if the page does not load. Tried it this morning and it worked in IE and a chrome incognito but not when I just opened chrome

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