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British Airways is happy to handle a number of transactions in dollars, pounds, or euros. Each transaction has a fixed price in each currency instead of a dynamic one that changes with exchange rates, so at the moment transactions in euros are way cheaper than transactions in dollars and pounds.

What currency you’re charged depends on what country you list as your residence, so I explained yesterday how to set your address to France to save about 25% on buying Avios.

The Free-quent Flyer (remember he did an awesome Manufactured Spending extra for my e-book) asked whether changing your address results in cheaper Cash & Avios awards on Twitter.

On almost all Avios awards you are given six payment choices that range from all of the Avios you are supposed to pay for the award down to about a third of the Avios. When you use fewer Avios, you have to pay more cash. Here is an example of the six price options for a one way award from New York to Berlin on airberlin:

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 11.35.36 AM

Free-quent Flyer was asking if the cash component was lower in euros than in dollars. I told him that it definitely was, but I didn’t have data.

He answered his own question, saying he would have saved $100 on a previous Cash & Avios award he booked if his account had been in euros instead of dollars.

So there is no reason not to put your British Airways account in euros right now; you’ll be able to buy miles cheaper and be given cheaper Cash & Avios options with no negative changes associated with switching. Here’s how to switch.

How cheap are the Cash & Avios options once you put your account in euros? Commenter Charles points us to a German-language post on the subject. It is a very good post, and Google Translate in Google Chrome translated it perfectly except for the charts, but you can pretty easily figure out that this chart is showing the price of “buying” Avios during a Cash & Avios award booking. It shows all nine Avios price bands (eg 4,500 Avios is band 1 and 12,500 Avios is band 4) and all six options for Cash & Avios awards at each price band.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 11.19.08 AM
From http://meilenoptimieren.com/executive-club-tutorial-praemienflug-buchen-avios-and-money/

Note that the prices are in euro cents. Right now 0.82 euros = $0.89.

Do check out the whole German post; it is really good. And do set the address on your British Airways account to somewhere in the euro-area. This trick will help you use Avios much more efficiently. I love Avios for short, direct, economy flights. Read more about Avios and the best Avios uses here.

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