Use Points or Spend $32k to Fly Business Class?

Tyler Soulliere
Apr 22, 2024
2 min read

Updated: Apr 25, 2024

Quick post here, but just wanted to point out again a true life example of what you get when you use points to fly, vs. having to pay cash.

Here are the details for our potential trip next Spring, 2025:

The plan is to fly out of New York; JFK, landing in Barcelona, BCN, February 18th, 2025.

We will be flying to Barcelona, non-stop, in business class (again, like we did May 2023 to Greece), all 3 of us; the LYLE Travelers, on American Airlines.

Total cost for this flight in points is 62,000 per person, for a total of 186,000 points + $711.90 USD in fees.

Qatar Airways uses Avios points, and to get Avios points, we would convert our RBC Avion points at a 1:1 conversion, to Avios. We have right now about 180K Avion points from spending on our RBC VISA credit cards and welcome bonuses from signing up for credit cards (the most recent welcome bonus was when Ashley applied for the RBC VISA Platinum, which gave her 35K Avion points).

For the balance of the points needed, we most likely will just convert our American Express Canadian Membership Reward points (we have over 600K) to British Airways Avios at a conversion of 1:1.

Now, if we were to book this exact same flight without points, using cash, it would cost us $2,143.00 CAD each, for a total of $6,426.90 CAD!!!

For flying home, we plan on flying out of Madrid; MAD, back to New York; JFK, March 4, 2025.

Again, we will be flying back to New York, non-stop, in business class, all 3 of us, the LYLE Travelers, on American Airlines.

Total Cost for this return flight in points is 62,000 per person, for a total of 186,000 points + 598.98 EUR in fees.

Since we used all of our RBC Avion points to get to Spain, which we converted to Avios points, we will use our American Express Canadian Membership Reward points to convert to Avios, to get back home, which as I mentioned we can just convert American Express Membership Reward points to Avios at a conversion of 1:1.

Now, if we were to book this exact same flight without points, using cash, it would cost us $8,407 CAD each, for a total of $25,220.60 CAD!!!

Lastly, we need to get to New York, which we will do by driving over to Detroit from Windsor, Ontario, Canada, taking a quick flight to get there and back, which again, we will just use points, most likely our American Express US Membership Reward points (we have almost 100K), which convert to Delta SkyMiles at a 1:1 ratio, vs. our American Express Membership Canadian Reward points that don't convert as good, 4:3 to Delta SkyMiles.

This would just be in economy, as it's a quick flight, and will only cost us 69K Delta SkyMiles + $33.60 USD in fees; roundtrip.