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Bits: win 100,000 Virgin Atlantic miles, Monarch sale, a good family ski resort

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News in brief:

Win 100,000 Virgin Flying Club miles

I have written about the Virgin Red smartphone app before.  It is a new product which tries to bring together customers from various Virgin Group businesses and cross-sell them other products.

Today, it will be running a competition to win 100,000 Virgin Flying Club miles.  (It is a reverse auction, where you make a cash bid for the miles.  The person who places the lowest unique bid wins  (e.g. if 10 people each bid 1p, 2p and 3p but only one person bids 4p, that person wins – once they have paid their 4p).

Their is a £1 entry fee which I would have assumed went to a good cause but, it seems, does not!  It is up to you whether you think a chance of winning 100,000 Virgin miles is worth £1.

Virgin Atlantic 747

Monarch Airlines £33 flash sale

Monarch doesn’t get a huge amount of coverage on HfP but if you live in the regions it is a reliable option.  Their flights can, of course, be booked via avios.com using Avios points.  You can also redeem Tesco Clubcard vouchers for Monarch flight credit at 2 x face value.

Until midday on Friday, Monarch is selling 5,000 seat at £33 each way.  They are valid for departures from 9th – 23rd March, 12th – 29th April and 4th – 26th May.

Full details can be found here.

Monarch

A massive hotel upgrade I didn’t need

Our trip to the snow over half-term involved an overnight stay in the Sheraton Frankfurt Airport.  I reviewed the Sheraton at Frankfurt Airport a couple of years ago here so I won’t go into full detail again.

We did, this time, get the biggest upgrade I think I’ve ever had.  We booked two standard rooms on SPG points (10,000 points per night).  The hotel upgraded us to a 140 square metre, two bedroom suite.

This is the standard looking main bedroom:

Sher1

This the work and living area:

Sher3

And this, in a separate room, was the rather silly dining table for eight:

Sher2

There was also a small preparation area for food.

Unfortunately for us, we were only awake in the room for about 90 minutes.  The dining table was handy for a room service dinner for the whole family though!

Ellmauhof Hinterglemm

A good family ski resort

Whilst I don’t intend to review it, this is the hotel where we stayed in Austria, the Ellmauhof.

If you want to take your kids skiing, I thoroughly recommend it.  Under 5’s have a dedicated ski school at the hotel whilst older children can walk or be driven into Hinterglemm to the main ski school.  The hotel, as a member of Kinder Hotels, is fully geared up for kids of all ages and it worked well for adults too.

The swimming pool also has a fantastic water slide!

All of the front line staff speak English and it is a 90 minute taxi ride from Salzburg Airport.  Recommended.

Category

Marriott Bonvoy, Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club

Comments (69)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Hugh says:
    24 Feb24 February 06:56

    Can’t see anything on the Virgin Red app – where should I be looking?

    • Stuart says:
      24 Feb24 February 07:12

      Me neither. I had a free prize draw competition only.

    • Simmo says:
      24 Feb24 February 07:49

      I can’t see it either!

    • Andrew says:
      24 Feb24 February 08:39

      I had an email from Virgin Red yesterday that this was coming…

      My question – which I may be able to answer shortly with a web search: what would 100,000 Virgin miles cost to buy direct?

      (I guess Virgin Marketing have been told they have to pay an internal trading cost to ‘Virgin miles sales’ and the £1 per person will basically end up covering it 😉 )

      • Andrew says:
        24 Feb24 February 08:47

        Answered with Google and HFP!

        About £1500 if you simply bought them…

        • Genghis says:
          24 Feb24 February 08:56

          Or much less if you managed to get your hands on lots of the £3 Tesco printer cartridges!

          • Andrew says:
            24 Feb24 February 09:03

            too soon Genghis, too soon 😉

            £3 not showing as out of stock currently BUT “there are currently no sellers for this product”

      • D says:
        24 Feb24 February 10:03

        You’re on the money with your assumption by the look of it. Prize value £1530, max. number of entrants 1500.

  • Alex W says:
    24 Feb24 February 08:44

    +1 for the Ellmauhof. I seem to remember it had a really good pool with a slide for the kids and hot tub etc for apres ski hangover. We stayed in self catering houses very nearby which had access to all the hotel facilities. A reasonable price too I remember. You can ski right up to the hotel in the evening.

    • Dom says:
      24 Feb24 February 11:12

      We were looking at non-skiing family snow holiday for next winter. Is there good non-ski activities (sledging, snow fun etc) or is it ski focused?

      • Rob says:
        24 Feb24 February 12:08

        They have some free sledges to borrow and, as the hotel is on a slope, you can do stuff there. We did a horse drawn sleigh ride into the mountains one night. Hotel has a huge range of kids activities as well including a little farm, pool, games room, kids club etc.

        If you want to avoid the skiers, take a look at Kempinski Berchtesgaden (formerly an InterCon) which is a luxury hotel up a mountain which does not focus on the ski market.

  • Su says:
    24 Feb24 February 08:48

    Help please, have downloaded the Virgin Red app but cannot find the reverse auction . I’m sure it’s me missing the obvious, could someone point me in the right direction please? Thanks

  • Clare Gibb says:
    24 Feb24 February 08:57

    I can’t find the app?!

  • Andrew says:
    24 Feb24 February 09:12

    it’s on the app now!

  • leo_c says:
    24 Feb24 February 10:20

    What did you do to get the upgrade Rob?
    Leo

  • TGLoyalty says:
    24 Feb24 February 10:28

    Bids in £1 increments only will be interesting!

    • TimS says:
      24 Feb24 February 10:57

      £1 increments is the norm for the Virgin Red app reverse auctions.

      Some good auction prizes have gone quite cheaply in the past.

  • Simmo says:
    24 Feb24 February 11:20

    Virgin Auction:
    From what I can see on this auction, there are only 1500 entries allowed, and only one entry per person! Entries cost £1

    Bids must be in whole £’s and the lowest unique bid wins.

    At the time of writing ‘only’ 1396 entries left!

    Imagine the lowest will need to be in the hundreds unless you’re really lucky!

    • Rob says:
      24 Feb24 February 12:05

      I doubt it. Psychology is at play here. What if no-one decides to bid £1 because they think everyone else will bid £1?

      • TimS says:
        24 Feb24 February 12:49

        A Hand Picked Hotels overnight stay with dinner & breakfast went for £70 the other week.

        I seem to recall that a Premium Economy return trip LON-JFK went for under £100 at the tail end of 2015.

    • Michael says:
      24 Feb24 February 13:17

      I’ve been using the app for months and have taken part in a few reverse auctions. What’s interesting here is that this is the first which has required you to pay £1 for entry. I can’t think what the rationale is other than trying to make a few quid.

      • TimS says:
        24 Feb24 February 14:44

        I think they are slowly starting to use the app as a testing ground for a number of different ideas & are now trying to test the demand for paid-entry auctions.

        In the last couple of months they have upped the number of points required for the final vault(s) but have also increased the ways to earn points, thus requiring more engagement/interaction from users.

        I hope that Virgin are comfortable that this (fee-charging) Unique-bid auction contains a large enough element of skill to not fall foul of the Gambling Act. Afterall, picking a unique number between £1 & £1530 with little or no additional information sounds a lot like a game of chance…

        • Rob says:
          24 Feb24 February 17:49

          I am tempted to enter, I reckon £1 will put off most people.

          • harry says:
            24 Feb24 February 18:15

            It’s a tough call – not to enter, though they would have been better-advised to donate all income to nominated charity & double it – sack the head of Marketing – but to get the lowest unique bid right.

            Is it a 1-day auction? Whether yes or not, there will be a typical curve spread of entries. There would not really be any point at all in entering anything under 50p IMV – too obvious, all numbers covered. 50p – (say) 150p, there will be plenty of entries (ie no uniqueness if you duplicate) but also a few gaps. I would not go much higher than that as not much point. So you’d maybe choose a number like 89p?

            I think I would be tempted to get a few friends & family together and grab a block of 10, (say) 71p-80p, knocking out anybody with a unique number in that range, and grabbing a gap (with any luck). Same strategy would appear to be more effective, the more friends & family you could muster & hence the bigger the block.

          • TimS says:
            24 Feb24 February 18:45

            Increments are whole pounds so your pennies strategy wouldn’t work.

          • harry says:
            24 Feb24 February 18:54

            You can obviously tell I have not entered yet 🙂

            OK, so bids are in increments of £1 – but it would be exactly the same strategy. Not worth entering a number under £50; decent chance of finding a gap £51-£150; increase your chances by friends & family buying as big a block as you can to knock out unique numbers & find a unique gap for yourself.

          • TimS says:
            24 Feb24 February 20:23

            But of course you still need to be willing to pay the “winning” price. £150 is still cheap for 100,000 miles but fewer people would be willing to pay that than would be willing to pay 150p so you also need to factor that into the equation.

            Likewise, the cap of 1500 entrants also needs to be factored in. Likely a far lower unique price than if there were 15000 entrants of course.

            Around 30% of the entries have been purchased already. I am 99% certain the winning price will be between £51-£150 based on previous Virgin Red reverse auctions.

          • harry says:
            24 Feb24 February 20:36

            50 hfp users could have gone for spread £50-£100 and got 2000 miles each for about £2.50 per person 🙂

    • Corrine says:
      25 Feb25 February 12:26

      Well if that’s the case my bid (less than £20) was a waste… but who knows ?? fingers crossed, after my last trip I’m currently VFC and Avios poor 🙁

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