Move Avios to Anyone for €10, Not £50: The Finnair Trick

You have found two Qsuite seats to Doha, the dates work, and you are ready to book. There is only one problem: the Avios are split across two accounts. Yours is flush; your partner's is 25,000 short. British Airways will happily move the difference from one account to the other, for a flat £50 and inside a set of annual limits. Or you can make the identical transfer for €10, with no cap at all, by routing it through Finnair Plus. Same Avios, same recipient, a fraction of the cost. Head for Points flagged the trick again at the end of June, and with award prices creeping up across the board, it is worth knowing before your next booking.

Three ways British Airways lets you move Avios between people

Before the workaround, it helps to know what British Airways offers directly, because one of these three options might already suit you.

The first is a Household Account. This is free, and it is the route most families should use. You can nominate up to six other people who live at the same address, and everyone's Avios flow into a shared pot you all draw from. The catch is in the name: everyone has to share a roof. If you want to move Avios to a friend, a grown-up child who has moved out, or a partner at a different address, a Household Account is no help.

The second is a direct transfer to another member. This is the one most people reach for when Household Accounts do not fit. British Airways charges a flat £50 per transfer and lets you move up to 60,000 Avios at a time. On top of that sit two annual limits: you can send a maximum of 60,000 Avios to any single person per year, and no more than 200,000 Avios in total across all transfers you make in a year. For a one-off top-up it does the job, but £50 is a meaningful chunk of the value you are moving.

The third is the freebie almost nobody qualifies for: British Airways Club Gold members can gift Avios to other members at no charge. If you hold Gold, you can stop reading here, unless you need to move more than 60,000 Avios to one person in a single year, in which case the trick below still helps.

Why Finnair only charges €10 for the same thing

Here is the part that turns a £50 fee into an €8-and-change fee.

In March 2024, Finnair switched its loyalty currency to Avios, joining British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Qatar Airways, Vueling and Loganair in the shared Avios family. The immediate benefit was that you can now shuffle Avios between your own linked accounts across all of those programmes instantly and for free, moving points to wherever you want to spend them.

Finnair brought one extra quirk with it. Finnair Plus lets you transfer Avios between two different Finnair Plus accounts for a fixed €10, with no cap on the amount. Because Avios move freely between British Airways and Finnair in both directions, you can chain those steps together to gift Avios to another person far more cheaply than British Airways would charge.

The full sequence looks like this. The person sending the Avios moves them from their British Airways Club account into their own Finnair Plus account, which is free and instant. They then use Finnair's "transfer to other people" facility to send those Avios to the recipient's Finnair Plus account for the €10 fee. The recipient finally moves the Avios out of Finnair Plus and into their own British Airways Club account, again free and instant. At every stage the transfer lands immediately, so the whole thing can be done in a few minutes once the accounts are set up.

The Finnair transfer itself is handled through the Finnair online shop, which feels a little odd. You add the transfer to a basket and check out as though you were buying a product. It works, it is just not the slick one-click experience you might expect. And because British Airways applies two-factor authentication when you move Avios out to a partner programme, keep your phone handy for that step.

The maths is the whole point. At roughly £8.50 to the euro's €10, you are paying about a sixth of British Airways' £50 fee. Just as importantly, the Finnair route carries no 60,000-Avios ceiling, so if you need to move 100,000 or 150,000 Avios to one person in a single go, you can, in one transaction, for the same €10.

The 90-day rule and the expiry trap

This is where the fine print earns its place, because two rules can catch you out.

The first is timing. You cannot transfer Avios out of a Finnair Plus account until that account is at least 90 days old. The account receiving the Avios can be brand new — recipients only ever receive, so there is no waiting period on their side — but the sender's account must have passed the three-month mark. The practical lesson is to open a free Finnair Plus account now, well before you need it, so the clock is already run down when a booking comes up. Opening an account you may never actively use costs nothing and buys you flexibility.

The second rule is more serious. Finnair Plus Avios expire after 18 months with no qualifying activity, and simply moving Avios into or out of the account does not count as qualifying activity. That means parking a large Avios balance in a dormant Finnair Plus account is genuinely risky — if the account sits untouched, those points can vanish. The safe approach is to treat Finnair purely as a bridge: move the Avios in and straight back out to British Airways, where your usual expiry rules apply, rather than leaving them sitting in Finnair. If for some reason points will linger, a small qualifying action such as a modest Avios donation to charity can register activity and reset the clock, but the cleaner habit is simply not to let Avios idle in Finnair at all.

Neither rule is a dealbreaker. They just reward a bit of planning: set the accounts up early, and keep the money moving.

When the saving is actually worth the effort

Saving roughly £41 per transfer sounds obviously worthwhile, and often it is. But the trick only matters when you genuinely need Avios in someone else's account, so it is worth being clear about when that happens.

The classic case is a two-person premium redemption. When you book a reward flight for two, the lead passenger frequently needs enough Avios in their own account to cover both seats, or each traveller books from their own balance and one of them falls short. Either way, you end up needing to consolidate points into a single account, and that is exactly what a person-to-person transfer solves. Imagine two off-peak Iberia business-class seats to Madrid at around 40,500 Avios each way per person; if your travelling companion is 20,000 Avios short of their half, closing that gap for €10 rather than £50 is a straightforward win. The same logic applies to short-haul: British Airways charges from 4,750 Avios each way plus about £17.50 in taxes for off-peak Zone 1 hops, so even modest redemptions can leave one person a few thousand points shy.

There is a value angle too. Move 50,000 Avios via Finnair and the €10 fee works out at a whisker over 0.02p per Avios — effectively rounding error against points that are comfortably worth 1p or more each when spent on premium cabins. Do the same transfer the British Airways way and the £50 fee is 0.1p per Avios, five times higher, plus you are boxed in by the 60,000 cap. You keep the same redemption value either way; you simply stop handing more of it back in fees.

Before you shuffle anything, though, check that the flights you want actually exist. Reward availability and the live Avios price for your route change constantly, and there is no sense moving points you cannot spend. You can sanity-check seats and current pricing with Pointsbot's flight insights first, then move only what you need to complete the booking.

One honest caveat: if you only need to shift a small number of Avios and you already live with the recipient, a free Household Account almost certainly beats any of this. The Finnair route shines for cross-household transfers, larger amounts above the 60,000 cap, and anyone who wants to avoid the £50 charge entirely.

Pro tip: Open a free Finnair Plus account today — one for you and one for your regular travel partner — even with no transfer planned. The 90-day sending clock starts the moment the account exists, so a few minutes of admin now means the €10 route is ready and waiting the day a booking depends on it.

The bottom line

Moving Avios to another person is one of those quietly useful mechanics that rescues a booking when points are stranded in the wrong account. British Airways' own transfer works, but it costs £50 and comes wrapped in a 60,000-per-transfer limit and annual caps. The Finnair Plus route does the identical job for €10 with no ceiling, as long as your sending account is at least 90 days old and you do not leave Avios sitting long enough to trip the 18-month expiry. Set the accounts up now, keep every transfer quick, and the next time a partner is a few thousand Avios short of a Club Suite seat, you will close the gap for barely more than the price of a coffee.