Avios – the shared rewards currency of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, and others – just rolled out a genuinely customer-friendly enhancement that should make (some) premium cabin awards easier to find. As first flagged by The Flight Club, Avios.com now offers an easy-to-use 12-month calendar for finding nonstop awards on British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus.
Instead of plugging in one date at a time and refreshing over and over, you can now pull up an entire month (or several) and see at a glance which days actually have award seats open … and how many. That might sound like a minor update (and it kind of is), but trust us when we say: It's big news.
Finding an open award seat – especially in business and first class cabins – has gotten harder by the year as more people than ever are sitting on stockpiles of transferable points. Airlines have spent years quietly stripping down their websites and burying the few dates that actually have award space, making it tougher to book with points. That gap is exactly why a number of third-party tools have cropped up in recent years to do the digging that airlines have made deliberately difficult.
One catch: You won't find this on this tool directly on British Airways' or Iberia's site. You have to go straight to the Avios website – the same one you'd use to move Avios between BA, Iberia, Aer Lingus, and so on – to log in and access the calendar. For now, it only covers British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus. Qatar Airways and Finnair, which also run on Avios, aren't included yet, though it wouldn't be surprising to see them added eventually. Qatar already has a similar calendar search of its own, for what it's worth.
The other limitation with this new calendar search is that it's limited to nonstop flights … for now. Avios promises that connecting flights will be added soon, but for now, you'll need to search each leg separately – and even then, you might come up empty since connecting itineraries don't always have access to the same availability.
Iberia is a great example of why this matters, though. At just 40,500 miles each way (during the off-peak season) from the East Coast – and cities like Chicago (ORD) – business class seats to Madrid (MAD) are notoriously tough to find. This calendar makes it much faster to zero in on the dates that are actually bookable. While the initial calendar will show every date with availability for the full month (across all cabins), you can uncheck the economy and premium economy boxes to quickly zero in on the available dates with lie-flat seats.
It's also a fast way to see Iberia's peak and off-peak pricing at a glance. Summer and holidays are most often peak dates, as you'd expect, but there are a few surprising pockets of higher pricing scattered through the rest of the year – and you may find some shoulder-season dates that you'd think cost more … but don't. If you can shift your dates by even a week, this tool makes it much easier to find the cheaper ones and potentially save thousands of Avios in the process.
Best of all, it's just plain … fast. Switching origin airports, destination cities, months, or even airlines happens almost instantly. If you were doing this manually by bouncing between BA, Iberia, and Aer Lingus' individual sites, it could easily eat up an entire afternoon. On routes with multiple daily nonstops, like British Airways' several Chicago-to-London (LHR) flights per day, you'll see availability broken down for each one.
Once you find dates that work, you'll still need to click through to BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus' own site to log in, confirm taxes and fees, and complete the booking. The calendar just gets you to the right dates much faster.
Bottom Line
Avios' new calendar search tool doesn't create more premium cabin award space – but it does make the space that already exists much easier to find. That's a meaningful upgrade for anyone chasing availability on British Airways, Iberia, or Aer Lingus, and it's a rare case of an airline program actually making things easier on its members.
