You Don’t Need American Express: How Revolut Ultra Turns Pocket Change Into Avios
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You don’t need American Express.
For a decade, “serious about Avios” meant carrying a card half of Europe wouldn’t accept. Revolut Ultra ended that argument — with a points engine that runs on every purchase you make, down to the pennies you round away.
There is a ritual every European points collector knows. You stand at a bakery, a parking machine, a family-run restaurant, and you ask the question: “Nehmen Sie American Express?” The answer decides whether that transaction earns anything at all. Multiply the answer — which is “no” far more often than the brochures admit — across a year of ordinary life, and you understand the quiet flaw in the Amex gospel: the world’s most famous points card earns nothing on the spending that makes up most of your life.
Membership Rewards remain a fine currency, and this is not a hit piece — Amex transfers to Avios too, and if a Platinum card fits your travel pattern, enjoy the lounges. Our argument is narrower and, we think, unanswerable: as an everyday Avios-printing machine in Europe, a Mastercard that works everywhere beats a status symbol that works sometimes. And since 2024, Revolut has quietly built exactly that machine — then bolted two mechanisms onto it that Amex simply does not have.
One point per euro, on a card every terminal accepts
RevPoints is Revolut’s loyalty currency, and the earning ladder is blunt: the free plan earns 1 point per €10, Premium 1 per €4, Metal 1 per €2 — and Ultra earns 1 RevPoint per €1, on everything, everywhere Mastercard is accepted. Which, unlike the competition, is effectively everywhere: the bakery, the parking machine, the taxi in Palermo. The engine never stalls on acceptance, and that single fact is worth more over a year than any welcome bonus.
Those points convert to Avios at 1:1 — and Revolut’s transfer list has grown to more than thirty airline programmes, including direct transfers into the Avios family. Both Revolut and the airlines periodically run 20–30% transfer bonuses, which is when the patient move their balances.
Spare Change: the feature Amex cannot copy
Here is the mechanism this article exists for. Revolut’s Spare Change feature rounds every card purchase up to the next euro and converts those pennies into RevPoints at roughly 50 points per €1 of round-ups. A €3.40 coffee becomes 60 cents of pennies becomes ~30 points — from a transaction that, on any other card in Europe, earns either a rounding error or nothing. And there is a throttle: a spare-change multiplier in the app sweeps a multiple of every round-up — set it to 3×, as we have, and each 40-cent round-up moves €1.20 into the points engine. You are, in effect, buying Avios at about two cents each, in amounts too small to feel, on autopilot.
Two honest cents each, to be clear — we publish our own valuation maths, and at 1.0–1.4p of typical redemption value you should not buy Avios at 2c and burn them on wine glasses. But redeemed the way our readers redeem — long-haul premium cabins at 2p+ per Avios, or transferred during a 20% bonus — the pennies outperform. It is pocket-money cost-averaging into award balances, and no traditional card issuer has anything like it.
Our own ledger, June 2026.
We do not do stock-photo testimonials. This is the account this article was written from: the same €3 → 150-point entry, day after day, produced by nothing but the 3× spare-change multiplier chewing through ordinary transactions.
With a typical monthly spend of €2,500 and Spare Change active, a strategic user generates 4,000+ points a month — that is a 4,000-Avios off-peak reward seat’s worth of currency, every single month.
The arithmetic: €2,500 of card spend = 2,500 points at Ultra’s 1:1 rate. Roughly sixty transactions averaging fifty cents of round-up = ~€30 of pennies = ~1,500 further points at the Spare Change rate. Run the 3× spare-change multiplier like we do and the pennies triple. Past 4,000 before a single shop multiplier — see the reward-pricing floor in our Avios Calculator FAQ.
Up to 20× through the Shops portal
The third mechanism is the one that shortens the road to a business-class seat: Revolut’s in-app Shops portal pays boosted rates — up to 20 RevPoints per €1 — at integrated partners, with further bonus points on stays and experiences booked through the app. The playbook writes itself: route the spending you were doing anyway (hotels, fashion, electronics) through the portal, let daily spend and pennies tick along underneath, and the balance compounds from three directions at once.
Where the points actually land
RevPoints move at 1:1 into the Avios ecosystem — and because Avios itself moves freely between the family programmes (as we explain in our crediting guide), your pennies can end up wherever they work hardest:
Ultra vs. the incumbent
| The everyday test | Revolut Ultra | American Express |
|---|---|---|
| Accepted at the bakery | Yes — Mastercard, everywhere | Ask first |
| Earns on daily spend | 1 point / €1 on Ultra | Only where accepted |
| Earns on your pennies | ~50 points / €1 of round-ups | No equivalent |
| Shopping multiplier | Up to 20× in-app | Occasional offers |
| Reaches Avios at 1:1 | Yes — 30+ programmes | Yes |
| Multi-currency travel account | Built in | No |
The crown moved. Not because Amex got worse — because the game stopped rewarding prestige and started rewarding coverage.
Full honesty, as always: Ultra is Revolut’s top tier at £45 a month (similar in euro markets), and the maths above is precisely how it pays for itself — run your own numbers in our free calculator before you commit. But if your Avios strategy still depends on a card you have to apologise for at the till, you are leaving points on every table in Europe.
Try Revolut via our linkReferral disclosure: the Revolut links in this article carry our referral code — if you sign up through them, this site may receive a benefit at no cost to you. It funds the free tools, and it does not change the numbers: every rate quoted above comes from Revolut’s published plan terms as of July 2026. Points mechanics change; check the app for your market’s current rates.