Groupon Avios Issue Resolved

I recently wrote about the challenges I was experiencing redeeming a Groupon Spain e-voucher for Avios Points with Iberia Plus (here).

I’m pleased to say this is now resolved and my Avios’ have appeared in my Iberia account (over a month after I bought them). In the process I also learnt from Groupon Spain that it was an issue affecting a ‘large number of customers’ who’d bought Avios at a similar time.

Combine My Avios

Having resolved this, I encountered a new problem. In theory, it should then be possible to move the Avios from an Iberia account, to a British Airways Executive Club account. To do this, you login to Iberia and use the ‘Combine my Avios’ feature, which can be found under ‘buying or transferring Avios’ on the left hand menu:

On this page, there is a tiny hidden red sentence right at the bottom, which says ‘don’t forget you can combine your Avios’. You then click this:

Once you click this, you’ll see the combine my Avios’ page and you can enter you BA login details and click to transfer Avios either way – in theory!

System Quirk

However, when I tried to use ‘combine my Avios’ to move the Avios from my Iberia account to British Airways Executive Club account, I got the following message:

‘You can only move avios from British Airways to Iberia plus – you cannot move your avios back again.’

Initially I was concerned that this was a change to prevent people doing exactly what I was doing – buying cheap points for Iberia, in order to transfer them to BA and get better value. However, I was determined not to be beaten, so I did a bit of research and discovered a quirk.

It turns out that, for some unknown reason, you cannot move Avios from Iberia to British Airways if you have a ‘Household Account’ set up. So the moment I removed my wife’s account, the option reappeared and I could select to move my Avios both ways (I’ll re-add my wife’s account later).

So, if you have a household account and experience difficulties using ‘combine my Avios’, then try removing it to transfer the points.

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