How to book cheap Virgin Atlantic tickets from Dublin

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• Clare Gibb says:

  19 Oct19 October 13:32

  I’m quite new to this. Were I to book a ticket from Dublin to SFO this way, do I have to get myself to Dublin to start the flight from there? Or can I pick it up at Heathrow? I know that sometimes they will cancel the whole trip if you do this, but if the DUB-LHR leg is on a different airline, does this still happen?

  • Percy Pig says:

    19 Oct19 October 13:45

    Never miss the first leg or the rest will be cancelled if it’s on the same booking. Doesn’t matter if they are diff airlines.

    • harry says:

      19 Oct19 October 19:09

      I’ve missed first legs but taken the return flight – sorted with a phone call.

      • John says:

        19 Oct19 October 20:41

        Might have been possible a few years ago, definitely think it’s unlikely to work very often now.

        Don’t risk it, people.

• Ian says:

  19 Oct19 October 13:41

  Why not book the flights on Virgin Atlantic’s ireland site?

• RT says:

  19 Oct19 October 15:33

  Completely off topic- just need some advice on the Lloyd’s upgrade voucher. Do you know if you can use this on connection flights? I.e. if I were to say go LHR to Cancun but only flights are LHR to JFK via BA connecting with AA to Cancun.. Does the Lloyd’s voucher upgrade both the BA and AA leg? Do I have to ring up for this?

  • Liz says:

    19 Oct19 October 21:38

    You should be able to use it for the LHR to JFK part I would have thought. I just redeemed mine for BA flights. The Avios staff are really helpful though so they will be confirm exactly what you can and can’t do with it.

• Michael says:

  19 Oct19 October 15:42

  OT: BA having a 40% off Avios sale for economy redemptions via LHR or LGW

  • RT says:

    19 Oct19 October 17:44

    I thought it was 40% off club world?

    • Michael says:

      19 Oct19 October 19:06

      No its world traveler, book between now and 2 Nov for travel up till 20 march 2016, but you still have to pay full taxes….

      • Michael says:

        19 Oct19 October 19:08

        No its world traveler, book between now and 2 Nov for travel up till 20 march 2016, but you still have to pay full taxes…. Raffles will probably have an article tomorrow about it

• Brian says:

  19 Oct19 October 15:47

  OT, but perhaps of interest to people. News of the demise of pay.com cards may be premature – I have just bought some from Morrison’s without any problems. This suggests that they might still appear in Tesco again. Perhaps it was simply due to a system blip that they were not activating at tills recently.

  • blenz101 says:

    19 Oct19 October 17:15

    I believe the Morrisons checkouts are producing an activation slip but the cards with a new message about “will be available in 24 hours”. Those over on PTS are reporting the cards still not working 24 hours later and those holding stock are preparing for a battle with Morrison’s customer services / pay.com / their credit card provider.

    It would certainly not be my advice to jump in and buy pay.com right now even if you can get hold of them.

    • harry says:

      19 Oct19 October 18:42

      However, the £50 (or £25) Amazon cards are a dream. You can credit them to your Amazon a/c in about 5 seconds – heaven on earth compared to Pay.coms.

      1. You buy them instore – self checkout is fine, just cover up the smaller barcode with your thumb. No limit on quantity.
      2. They are now (activated) just as valuable as cash.
      3. Log into your Amazon a/c, input the scratch off code, that’s it 🙂 Immediately increases your balance.

      You could easily get through £1000 in about 20 x 10 seconds = under 4 mins. Whereas Pay.com/ 3V was (and is on remnants lol) a PITA.

      Must be the easiest way to get free petrol/ diesel in the UK – or just use to manufacture spend to meet an Amex requirement. Also gives you humungous quantities of free Avios.
      Plus there is no problem with using money off coupons that Match & More will throw at you, eg £10 off £50 this week.

      • harry says:

        19 Oct19 October 18:43

        So that begs the question – does Tesco sell Amazon giftcards or not?

        • mark2 says:

          19 Oct19 October 19:30

          Sadly I have never seen any or would have bought them.

      • Matt says:

        19 Oct19 October 21:55

        But what will you them do with thousands of pounds in amazon apart from shopping?

        • Peter K says:

          19 Oct19 October 22:40

          My thoughts exactly. I like Amazon but other portals are often cheaper for what I want so I don’t get that much on it!

      • Alan says:

        21 Oct21 October 08:41

        Is there a way to “cash out” of Amazon rather than just use the Amazon balance for purchases please?

        • harry says:

          2 Nov2 November 17:40

          Only by buying & re-selling AFAICS

• Nigel says:

  19 Oct19 October 18:00

  I’ve just booked a DUB-LHRLGW-LAS-LGW-LHR-DUB for next year BA Business and Virgin UC
  Total of £1284 per person instead of £3449 each with Virgin so a saving of £4K!

  Will fly LHR-DUB as a RFS-£17.50 and 4500 Avios (IIRC)
  No credit card fee-Unlike the 1.5% at Virgin.

  Bargain

• Chewyjoint says:

  19 Oct19 October 18:19

  When I looked at these Virgin fares on the ITA Matrix tool the fare rules suggested that stopovers are allowed in each direction for about 75 Euros. Going out the fare goes up considerably as the UK Business Class departure tax also kicks in but coming back not so bad.

• Wally says:

  19 Oct19 October 20:46

  For anyone that’s interested…there are also significant savings to be had booking this way in economy as well as Upper Class. Furthermore, you can leave a big gap between your DUB->LON/MAN leg and your LON/MAN->USA leg. This might not be the very cheapest way to do it but, for me, I can justify taking the wife and kids for a short break in Dublin a few weeks beforehand whereas I can’t justify dragging them over to Dublin just to fly straight back and lose a day or two of our US holiday!

  • Jude says:

    20 Oct20 October 14:45

    So have you booked a separate one way ticket from LON/MAN to DUB, then will take the DUB-LON/MAN leg home then a few weeks later go LON/MAN – USA? That sounds great if you did. Can you also do this on Virgin redemptions or is it only on cash flights?

    • petewally1976 says:

      3 Nov3 November 15:31

      I haven’t actually booked it but have priced it up several times. It even works in school holdays too. For example (just now done this on Skyscanner):

      One-way Ryanair flight MAN->DUB on 29/5/16 comes in at £18.

      Then use multi-city option and you can get DUB->MAN (1/6/16 to complete your short half-term break), MAN->MCO (31/7/16), MCO->MAN (14/8/16), MAN->DUB (15/8/16) to price up at £606 per adult. So your total is £624. This compares with £1005 for the MAN->MCO return and you are getting a free short break in Ireland (although you’d obviously have to pay for hotel etc for that)!

      This doesn’t price up on as many dates next July/August as it did a few weeks ago when I was looking but they’re still there if you look. I haven’t checked through LON recently but it was working very similar to MAN a while back.

      The only slight problem with this approach is that the final leg out of Manchester leaves the same day as you arrive back from the states which MAY cause a problem with persuading the check-in staff to only check your bag through to MAN rather than DUB. If you only book the 3 legs (don’t book the final leg) the price goes up to £694 (still a very good deal of course). In this particular example there seems to be a solution to book the final leg a day later which is still pricing at £606 but in the past I’ve done that and it has put the price up!

      As for doing this kind of booking with a Virgin points redemption, it’s not something I’ve looked at to be honest, I would think it would be difficult if not impossible!

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