How to transfer Iberia Avios points to British Airways Avios points
Mirror Copy of http://www.headforpoints.com/2016/06/18/how-to-transfer-iberia-avios-points-to-british-airways-avios-points/
How to transfer Iberia Avios points to British Airways Avios points
I have covered a few Iberia Plus promotions on Head for Points recently. This has led to a few emails asking exactly how you can transfer Avios points from Iberia Plus to British Airways Executive Club.
This article will act as a reference post and I can direct future queries to it!
The important thing to remember is that there is the ‘proper’ way to do this and there is the ‘fudge way when Iberia’s IT goes down the toilet’ way. I will cover both here.
Here are a few things to remember before moving Avios points out of Iberia Plus:
If you want to transfer INTO Iberia Plus, your Iberia account must also have earned at least 1 Avios point. The easiest way is to do a transfer from American Express Membership Rewards or credit a flight, car rental or hotel stay.
You can transfer your points back and forth, as many times as you like, for free
Transfers are instantaneous
For the transfer process to work, you should aim to have the name, email address and date of birth identical across your Iberia and British Airways accounts
There are two ways to do the transfer. You will often find that doing it from ba.com fails for technical reasons no-one can understand. You may have more success doing it from Iberia Plus. If that fails, there is also a Plan C!
From ba.com:
Go to ba.com and log-in via the top right of the screen. You will be taken to the Executive Club home page.
Click on ‘Combine My Avios’ in the left hand margin.
However, as I mentioned above, this often fails to work when you try to move Avios points out of Iberia. This forces you to plan B:
From iberia.com:
This is the one that proves tricky because it is hidden away!
Hover over ‘Iberia Plus’ again in the top-right corner and select ‘My Avios’ under the ‘My Profile’ menu
From the ‘My Avios’ page, click on ‘Buying or transferring Avios’
At the bottom of that page, headed ‘Buy, give away or transfer Avios’, you will see the line “Don’t forget you can combine your Avios with those of other customer loyalty programmes”. Click this text.
(Important: if your Iberia account has not been open for 90 days and has not earned at least 1 Avios point, you will NOT see this line of text because you are not yet able to transfer Avios. Instead, you will see this:
There is a blank space under the ‘Transfer’ box where the ‘combine’ link should be.)
You will now be on the ‘Combine My Avios’ page. Follow the instructions to send your points to avios.com or British Airways Executive Club.
And if that still fails to work:
From avios.com:
For reasons unknown, ba.com and iberia.com will often throw up error messages when you try to transfer between the programmes.
However, using avios.com as an intermediary almost always works perfectly.
(Unless your avios.com account is a household account. Then you are stuffed!)
If you don’t have an avios.com account you will need to create one. Then, from inside avios.com using the ‘Combine My Avios’ option under ‘My Account’, do this:
Make a transfer from iberia.com into avios.com
Make a transfer from avios.com to ba.com
This WILL work (most of the time!) even when other options fail.