Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
As we understand it, for redemptions Avios and spare cash are returned to the passenger's account and credit card respectively. However for commecial bookings - revenue bookings - these are retained in the FTV or maybe the similar instrument knwn as EMD, until there is only £20 left. The potential confusion is that if you Part Pay with Avios, it's still a commercial booking.
This is a straight Avios redemption (no Part Pay with Avios). So it seems like a reasonable workaround to rebook and throw away a cheap award (as it’s all
-in-all comparable to paying the cancel/redeposit fee on the original redemption which was the intent all along).