The BA Amex Companion Voucher Now Works on Avios Holidays

TL;DR: On May 20, 2026, British Airways and American Express made the BA Amex Companion Voucher usable on British Airways Holidays packages paid with Avios, returning 25% of the Avios you spend (up to 200,000 back on the Premium Plus card). It is no longer two seats for the price of one, but it sidesteps the voucher's biggest problem: finding reward seats.

The British Airways American Express Companion Voucher has always carried a frustrating asterisk. The perk sounds incredible: hit the annual spend threshold, earn a voucher, bring a companion on a reward flight for the cost of one person's Avios plus taxes. The catch has always been the same. You have to find two BA Reward Flight Saver seats on the same flight, and BA releases that award space like it is rationing it during wartime.

On May 20, 2026, BA and Amex changed the math. The voucher now works on British Airways Holidays packages booked with Avios, and that quietly fixes the part everyone complained about.

What actually changed

The voucher used to be a flights-only instrument tied to scarce award inventory. Now it has a second life.

The mechanics:

• Book a British Airways Holidays package and pay for it fully or partially with Avios. The voucher returns 25% of the Avios you spend. Put 40,000 Avios toward a package, get 10,000 back.
• The rebate caps by card tier: up to 200,000 Avios per booking on the BA Premium Plus card, up to 50,000 Avios on the standard BA Amex.
• You still earn the voucher the same way: £15,000 of spend in a card year.
• You claim it through an online form within 72 hours of booking, and the new redemption path is open for bookings made through early 2027.

Why this matters if you hold Avios

The old voucher and the new use case solve completely different problems, and the new one is more usable for most people.

Reward Flight Saver seats are capacity-controlled. On popular routes and peak dates, finding two of them together is the entire game, and often you simply cannot. A Holidays booking has none of that constraint. There is no reward-seat availability to hunt for. It works in any cabin, for up to nine travelers, and you can travel after the voucher's own expiry date as long as the booking was made while it was valid.

For a cardholder who has been sitting on a voucher they could never use because the award space never appeared, this turns a dead perk into a live one. That is a real increase in the practical value of holding a BA Amex.

The honest caveat

This is a usability win, not necessarily a value win.

Two seats for the price of one on a Reward Flight Saver booking, when you could find the space, was a genuinely outsized redemption. Getting 25% of your Avios back is a smaller headline number. If you are the rare traveler who reliably found paired award seats in business class, the old use case could beat the new one on raw cents-per-point.

For everyone who could never find that space, though, 25% back on a booking you can actually make beats a theoretical 50%-off on a booking you never could. A perk you can use is worth more than a better perk you cannot.

If you have a voucher gathering dust because BA never showed you the seats, this is the month to look at a Holidays package instead. The perk finally meets the reality of BA's award inventory.