I booked a CW ticket 2 days ago for my partner in the ex-Dublin sale to LAX. This worked out as £1086 round trip. He will get 500 TPs to take him to Gold(could have gotten a lot more TPs with different routing but 500 is all he needs). He will also get 30,000 avios for the trip as a BA Silver member.

Has he redeemed avios for this trip instead of paying cash(assuming there was availability - which there is not), he would have paid 104,500 avios to fly from DUB-LHR-LAX and back to LHR which is what his cash ticket routing is. He would also have had to pay £334 in taxes. If he flew direct from LHR, it would be 4,500 less avios but an extra £200 odd in taxes.

So...ignoring the Tier Point angle, the cash option costs him £750 more, but he avoids paying 104,500 avios and he nets an extra 30,000 avios for the flights, so he is 134,500 avios better off. In this scenario an avios is worth about .55p.

Obviously this is an extreme example and there are a lot of extra factors here. Yes that was a sale price, but tbh sales are fairly common and it is often easier to get this kind of sale price than finding reward availability. If you need Tier Points, then the avios value goes down even further, in this example. On the other hand, if you need flexibility, then the avios booking is much better.

Ultimately though, my growing realisation is that I suspect avios are overvalued by some people who value them at 1p an avios. There are still some routes which make excellent value for redeeming(LAX-HNL, DUB-BOS, TXL-AUH) but for me at least, most things I need to use them for, when compared to cash, I rarely exceed .7p an avios - even with RFS.

I think their value will go down after April. If availability was much better or fuel surcharges were eliminated, then this would be a different story. If it were not for short haul US and RFS European redemptions, I would probably value avios at .5p.