Buying Avios with Finnair Plus: how to do it and the current promotion

Buy Avios for Less With Finnair Plus

The most recent promotion (ended November 20, 2024) allowed you to buy Avios from the Finnair Plus program with a discount of up to 50%.

Here are the points purchase tiers and the associated discounts:

The promotion works in tiers, where the more points you buy, the higher the percentage discount.

During this promotion, by buying 75,000 Avios, it cost 825 euros (instead of 1,650 euros) or US$872, i.e. 1.16 US cents per Avios (or 1.62 cents CAD per Avios).

This is slightly cheaper than the last Avios points promotion with Qatar Airways Privilege Club, where the cost was 1.97 CAD cents per Avios.

Avios will be credited to your Finnair Plus account 1 to 3 days after purchase.

Buying Avios with Finnair could help if you’re short for booking an award flight, if you’ve exhausted all the other options to earn Avios via credit cards.

Don’t forget, you can combine your Finnair Plus and British Airways Executive Club Avios by linking your accounts, and transfer them indirectly to Qatar Airways Privilege Club, since this program allows Avios to be transferred from British Airways Executive Club.

In other words, this type of promotion is just one more tool to collect enough Avios for a flight in the coveted QSuite, for example!

A credit card with no foreign transaction fees

As Avios purchases are billed in US dollars, we recommend using a credit card with no conversion charges for foreign currency transactions. Payment methods accepted for points purchases are Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

Here are three cards that save you from paying the 2.5% foreign currency conversion fee:

Other ways to earn Avios

Before buying Avios, you may also want to look at the other options available to you in Canada through:

All of these programs are transfer partners with British Airways Executive Club. So you can easily transfer your points into Avios at a 1:1 rate to Finnair Plus.

Here are the best credit card offers from these different programs:

And you can even earn them directly with the RBC British Airways Visa Infinite Card!

Conclusion

Is it worth buying Avios with this Finnair promotion? As with any points and miles purchase, it will depend on your goal—and it’s worth remembering you can use them with both Finnair and British Airways.

You’ll need to decide based on the award flights you want to book very soon, since Finnair is based in Finland and doesn’t fly to Canada. For example, 30,000 Avios are required for a one-way economy flight with Finnair between North America (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) and Europe.

See this article for everything you need to know about the Finnair Plus program, now that the airline adopted Avios in 2024.

Here are the routes we particularly like with Avios, also known as “sweet spots“: