TLDR: Award flights to the UK can look like great deals, but high taxes and fees, especially on return flights, often wipe out the value. Always compare taxes, fees, and portal redemptions before transferring points—sometimes paying cash or booking through a travel portal is the smarter move.
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If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we are always itching for the opportunity to redeem our credit card and airline points at the best value possible. Since I am still a full-time student in college, I also usually prefer to use points over cash whenever I can. I have plans to visit London in the next few months, and as a points-savvy connoisseur, I’ve been keeping an eye out for an itinerary I can book using my points.
When I search for flights, I turn to mainly two tools: Google Flights and seats.aero. In order to determine whether or not a point redemption is worth it, you need a baseline cash fare to work off of, which is essentially the out-of-pocket cost of a similar itinerary that you would book to your destination.
Using this method, I’ve usually been able to come across a redemption that is suitable for my situation, allowing me to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars and enabling me to redeem my points at an optimal rate. However, I’ve noticed that I’ve been having some difficulty finding optimal redemptions for flights for my upcoming London trip.
While finding a cheap flight from the U.S. to London isn’t a problem, I’ve been having a lot of difficulty finding a flight home from the UK (and Europe in general) back to the U.S. due to one major thing: taxes & fees.
As with all trips, you should start by finding out how much it would cost out-of-pocket to pay for your flights. I find the cash fare for flights by exclusively using Google Flights. For my trip to London, I am planning to go during the last week of September into the first week of October, and I’ll be flying out of the Philadelphia tri-state area.
If I were to pay for my round-trip flights from the U.S. to London out-of-pocket, it would cost $540 for nonstop flights on British Airways and American Airlines between New York (JFK) and London (LHR). Considering that I’ve been able to land nonstop round-trip flights between the U.S. and Europe for less than $400, this is less than optimal, and I’d rather try to use my points to save money.
After you have a cash price metric to work off of, the next step in deciding whether or not to use your points to book your flights is to use an award search tool. Personally, my favorite award search tool to use is seats.aero because it easily consolidates all the information you need to know about award redemptions on your route, such as points price, taxes & fees, travel duration, appropriate transfer partners, etc.
When searching for flights from the Philadelphia tri-state area to London, the best option that pops up for me is a nonstop flight from Washington DC (IAD) to London (LHR) on Virgin Atlantic for 6,000 points + $110 in taxes & fees.
This is a pretty good deal, as Virgin Atlantic is one of my favorite airlines to fly between the U.S. and Europe. Last time I flew on Virgin Atlantic, they had a brand new cabin, with a stellar in-flight entertainment system, ambient lighting, and friendly service thanks to crew hospitality. 6,000 points to fly nearly 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean between two continents is an amazing deal, and the $110 in fees is barely anything compared to what you’d pay out-of-pocket.
However, this “amazing deal” doesn’t last long when you compare it to the cost of the return flight.
While the return flight from London (LHR) to Washington (IAD) also costs 6,000 points in Economy, the fees are exorbitant compared to the reverse route. Instead of costing $110 USD in fees, the return route costs £233 in taxes & fees, which is equivalent to about $318 USD, costing nearly triple.
In order to determine whether or not using points in this situation (and other situations) is appropriate, you need to calculate the cent-per-point (CPP) value you’d be getting on your points if you were to redeem them.To find this cent-per-point value, you need to take the cash value and subtract the taxes & fees from the cash value. Multiply this result by 100. Take this product and divide it by the number of points you’ll use.
Using the flight options I’ve just showcased, I can find the cent-per-point value by evaluating the following expression: (($540 - $110 - $318) * 100) ÷ (12000). After evaluating the expression, the CPP value comes out to about 0.93 cents per point.
0.93 cents per point is a pretty bad redemption value. When it comes to redeeming points, if your priority is to save cash, the minimum value you should be redeeming your points for is one cent-per-point, as you can easily attain this value by using credit card portals to book your flights, such as Capital One Travel and Chase Travel℠.
When I was browsing through the flight options that seats.aero was showing me, I realized something: results for British Airways Avios flights weren’t showing up, even though I knew that I could transfer my Chase points to British Airways Avios and book my flights through their platform.
I circumvented this issue by navigating straight to the British Airways Avios website and searching for award flights directly through their own platform. After searching for flights from London to the Philadelphia area, I came across an option that could work for me.
By booking through British Airways Avios, I could fly directly from London (LHR) to Philadelphia (PHL) for 27,500 Avios + $120 USD in fees. Flying into Philadelphia was a much better option for me compared to flying back into New York or Washington.
Even though the fees for this return flight were much more comparable to the fees for the outbound flight, it did come with a steeper point cost. Once again, to determine whether or not this point redemption would be worth it, I needed to calculate the cent-per-point value of the redemption.
After doing the calculations, the cent-per-point value of this redemption similarly came out to be 0.93 cents per point.
Since the point redemption values of the two bookings were the same, I thought I’d have to decide between saving more cash or saving my points. However, a thought popped up into my mind: I could take advantage of transfer bonuses to decrease the amount of points I would need to redeem to book the flights.
In the recent past, Chase has often offered transfer bonuses to both Virgin Atlantic Flying Club and British Airways Avios, meaning you could transfer your credit card points into airline miles for a bonus higher than the standard 1:1 transfer rates.
Historically, the transfer bonus rate for Chase to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club has stood at either 30% or 40%, and the transfer bonus rate for Chase to British Airways Avios has stood at either 20% or 30%.
If I were to transfer my Chase points at the highest bonus rates, I would need to redeem only 4,286 points for the Virgin Atlantic flight, and 21,154 points for the British Airways flight.
With these new point amounts, the cent-per-point value of the redemption would come out to be 1.22 cents per point.
While this is better than the minimum 1-cent-per-point value, it still isn’t exactly optimal. Because I still have many points I earned at a 1.25 CPP value on my Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card before October 26, 2025, I could redeem my points on the Chase Travel℠ portal at the 1.25 CPP value.
If I were to use the Chase Travel℠ portal, however, I would have to book my flights much like I’d book my flights via Google Flights, which only had cheap(er) flights for New York. By transferring my points, I could fly out of Washington DC and into Philadelphia, which was much more optimal for me rather than traveling all the way to JFK.
Award redemptions on UK flights can look incredibly attractive at first glance, especially when you see ultra-low point prices on routes between the U.S. and London. However, as this example shows, the real cost of these redemptions often hides in the taxes and fees, particularly on return flights departing the UK.
While there are scenarios where using points makes sense (such as leveraging transfer bonuses or flying into more convenient airports), not every award booking automatically represents good value. Running the numbers, calculating your true cent-per-point value, and comparing against portal redemptions or cash fares is essential before transferring points.
In short: UK award flights aren’t bad by default—but they require more scrutiny than most. If your redemption doesn’t meaningfully beat a 1–1.25 cent-per-point baseline, it may be smarter to save your points for a better opportunity.
