Published: 24 May 2026
How we used Avios to score Business Class Flights to the World Cup
My cousin and I love watching sport and over the years we have been lucky enough to visit many big events across the world together, including the Olympics, Euros and Ryder Cup. However neither of us had ever been to the big one – the FIFA World Cup – and as we both have a milestone birthday coming up this year, we decided to try and change that and attend the 2026 event.
Planning a World Cup trip is complex, plus cash flights are expensive:Â
- The tournament is being held this summer across 16 cities in the US, Canada and Mexico. For the first time, there are 48 countries taking part, this means more games – all spread over a much greater geography than before – and longer travel times between cities.Â
- The World Cup finals draw was due to be made on the 5 December 2025, only 6 months before the tournament. We wouldn’t know who was playing at what venue and what date until then.
- The first ticket sale phase after the draw was via a ballot – applicants were to choose which games they would like to go to and, with many games likely to be over-subscribed, tickets would be allocated at random amongst the applicants. By the time the main ticket ballot draw results came out, flights for June 2026 had been on sale for nearly 7 months and there would be very few bargains from the UK to the US to be had.Â
- For high demand routes & events, frequent flyer miles redemption availability tends to disappear very quickly – sometimes nearly a year in advance.
- There was no point in planning anything until we had secured tickets for at least a couple of games and knew where we wanted to go. We also decided that we wanted at least one really strong game to build the trip around – and tickets for the big games were always going to be in high demand
- My cousin only had 4 days of his annual leave left to use…
Don't miss out on your opportunity to enter the Random Selection Draw to apply for #FIFAWorldCup tickets  🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇸
— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) December 9, 2025
Applications open on December 11th !
Ticket Strategy – and some success!
In the end, we applied for all the Scotland and England group games (my English born/Scottish resident cousin inexplicably claims to support both home countries equally) with the hope that we would be successful in something and try to build a schedule around that.
Eventually we managed to get tickets for Scotland v Brazil in Miami and England v Ghana in Boston. With 10 weeks to go before the start of the tournament, I was tasked with finding some reasonably priced flights.
Initial planning
With games on the Tuesday in Boston, Wednesday in Miami and needing to be back in the UK on the following Sunday, I started looking at flight options. The cheapest indirect flights from the UK were coming in at around £700 return in economy with the lowest priced direct flights costing over £1,000 each. Â
Remembering the lack of comfort and general grumpiness on my last long haul flight in economy, I also priced up some other options: Premium Economy flights were twice the price of Economy and Business Class tickets were well over £3,000 each – so I started looking at whether Avios points could make the trip more achievable.
Using Avios for Business Class Flights
I have done many long-haul Avios redemptions on BA in the past, and generally have booked these well in advance to secure business & first class tickets to places such as Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Las Vegas and Cape Town. However, BA do not make it easy to see Avios availability on their website, especially if you have some flexibility in your schedule in terms of dates or airports. Subscription services such as SeatSpy and Reward Flight Finder offer a much quicker & transparent way of searching for availability but I ideally wanted to see a range of flight options from the UK to the US on a broad range of dates – ideally in business class.
How Qantas Flight Reward Finder Helped
Qantas Flight Reward Finder is an amazing free search facility that helped immensely – It enables you to quickly search for their reward flight availability to from specific airports or geographic regions. You can also easily filter flights by booking class and by number of stops.
The great thing here is that Qantas is a member of the OneWorld alliance, alongside British Airways. This means that (generally) any reward flight available to Qantas frequent flyers on British Airways operated flights should also be available to members of the BA Club.
A search for UK > US East Coast found a pair of business class tickets direct from London Heathrow to Boston on BA available on the evening before the England game. As we needed to travel back (at the latest) on the Saturday evening, a search in the other direction found two Houston > London Heathrow seats, also in business class. Both these searches took under a minute.
A quick check of the World Cup fixture list showed Cape Verde v Saudi Arabia taking place in Houston the day before this return flight. Securing tickets for this game was unlikely to be a problem so adding that would make a nice 3 game itinerary which also fitted within my cousin’s holiday restrictions – as long as I could secure the flights.
As this was an open-jaw flight redemption, this could not be booked online and involved calling BA. The flights were 198,000 Avios + £499 taxes & fees each return but as I also used a 2-4-1 voucher from my British Airways Premium Plus American Express card, the total for two people was 198,000 Avios + £998 taxes and fees. Â
A few points about the Qantas Flight Reward Finder
- The regional search option gives you a lot more flexibility, but you can also search by specific airport. However one huge downside with Qantas Flight Reward Finder is that it generally only covers major cities – for example only 25 airports are covered in the whole of Europe – fine if you want to visit Rome or Paris but less than ideal if you are looking at Luxemburg or Berlin.
- Qantas Flight Reward Finder availability is not live and may be a few hours old. I have not had an issue using the tool to find availability on BA but it is something to be aware of.
- Do not assume automatically that you can book everything that comes up using your Avios on BA. You should be fine with BA operated flights but availability on other airlines (especially on Qantas) may be different. KLM, Air France and Emirates may be Qantas partners but they are not part of OneWorld so you are not going to be able to use your Avios on those flights either.
- The miles required for a redemption and the taxes & fees quoted on the Qantas Flight Reward Finder are for Qantas Frequent Flyer members only – BA uses a different chart to price off so whilst the availability might be the same, the cost of the redemption could be quite different. My advice is when you have found something on the Qantas Flight Reward Finder, follow it up with a dummy Avios redemption on the BA website so you can sure of availability and costs before making a final decision on your booking.
Was the Redemption Worth It?
Valuing Avios is always subjective, but even using a conservative valuation, the Business Class redemption compared favourably with paying cash for Economy flights during a peak travel period. Avios are definitely worth somewhere between 0.5p (converted to Nectar points and spent in Sainsbury’s) and 1p (general consensus), although people do value them higher than that – especially for demand flights at peak times. So to fly business class to the World Cup, the flights cost between £994 (99,000 x 0.5p plus £499) and £1,489 (each (99,000 x 1p + £499).
We successfully secured cheap tickets for Cape Verde v Saudi Arabia but unfortunately there were no reward flights available on American Airlines using Avios for the internal Boston > Miami and Miami > Houston flights so we booked these for cash (I was actually tempted to try super-low cost Spirit Airlines – a good job we dodged that one). Hotels in Boston are crazy priced at the best of times but we found somewhere near the airport to stay for 2 nights (as we effectively only have one day in Boston anyway). At the time of writing, I haven’t booked a hotel in either Miami or Houston as prices are falling on an almost daily basis and we still have 4 weeks to go.
This is not intended to be a bragging post, I merely wrote this to show what is possible with some creative thinking. So many people tell me they have unused air miles sitting in their account because they assume there is never any availability. In reality, flexibility, alternative tools and a bit of creativity can unlock some surprisingly good options.
Further reading
- For more details on redeeming Avios for British Airways flights, take a look here
- There are more than 90 ways you can collect Avios which can be used to book holidays to dream destinations, see our article.
- Visiting the US? Using MPC may save you a lot of time on arrival at Passport Control.
