AccorHotels (brands Sofitel, Mercure, Novotel, Ibis, etc) is one of the remaining places for arbitrage Avios earning. If you credit into BA Executive Club your Accor LeClub points get a 2:1 conversion. If you credit to Iberia Plus it is 1:1 into Avios (which you can then move over to BA at 1:1).
BA recently emailed executive club members about a quadruple earning promotion. But the current Iberia 3x offer can be far better value.
Both promotions require you to opt into to converting your Accor Le Club points into Avios automatically. Automatic conversions also avoid the need to round up to the full amount of points that would be necessary for a manual conversion – so this works even with cheap stays.
Details of the BA offer are here. If you earned 1000 base points from a stay, you would get a bonus 3000, giving 4000 total. Which would then be converted into Avios going to BA at the 2:1 rate reducing it to 2000 Avios.
Details of the Iberia offer are here. (But typically for Iberia it is badly worded in English, switch to Spanish if you can). There is mention of a promotional rate, but the deadline for this has passed. Instead look at the 3x earning bit.
If you earned the same 1000 base points you would get a bonus 2000, giving just 3000 total, but these would convert at 1:1 into 3000 Avios in Iberia Plus that you could bring over to BAEC at 1:1.
The other benefit of crediting to IB+ rather than BA Exec Club is that you preserve the 1:1 value of any OTHER points you earn from other promotions, etc.
Both promotions require you to complete stay your stay by the end of the year. The BA version allows bookings until the end of November, the IB version end of this month. The IB version also appears limited to just one stay. (So you could switch to the BA version after that!)
But it can be lucrative difference if decent value stay. By way of example I recently booked the Sofitel Heathrow Terminal 5 for a friend. (Sadly I couldn’t persuade them to stay somewhere on the Bath Road for a fraction of the cost).
1 night at £215 (yes I know…). As this was on of the upper Accor brands, it earns at 25 Le Club points per 10 EUR. Giving us 1275 base points.
Under the Iberia offer they received a bonus 2550 points to take it up to 3x earning. They didn’t earn any status points, as I’d only just signed them up to Le Club. But I did register their account for this offer, giving 2x points – intended for members who have been inactive for period that got another 1275.
So we had:
Base: 1275
IB 3x: 2550
Other: 1275
TOTAL: 5100 Le club.
These converted automatically into 5100 Avios at Iberia Plus (now moved over to 5100 Avios in their BA account).
If we’d used the BA offer:
Base: 1275
BA x4: 3825
Other: 1275
TOTAL: 6375 Le club.
BUT these would have converted into just 3187 Avios going direct to BA!
And if they had stayed in a hotel that was subject to other local bonus points alongside, the BA conversion route would have similarly decimated those bonus points!
Indeed, if you were earning 4x bonus points for a stay in a ‘new hotel’ (this is a periodic offer they have) then the current BA offer would have been:
1 x base
3 x base BA bonus
3 x base new hotels bonus
1 x base inactive account bonus
= 8 x base.
Converted at 2:1 = 4x base in Avios.
If they had used the IB offer:
1 x base
2 x base IB bonus
3 x base new hotels bonus
1 x base inactive account bonus
= 7 x base.
Converted into Avios at 7x base Avios.
Without the IB offer but still going to IB Plus:
1 x base
3 x base new hotels bonus
1 x base inactive account bonus
= 5 x base.
Converted into Avios at 5x base Avios.
So even without the IB offer, if you have high hotel promos. The BA quadruple offer may take away more than it gives due to the exit devaluation on everything.
LoyaltyLobby has a list of the current 4x earners as ‘new hotels’.
(The one mitigation in favor of BA offer, is that even if auto-converting the points you earn move you towards status with Accor. And the 4x offer gets you there faster. That said, for the Sofitel stay, 5100 got them Silver status already…)