How to earn and spend Avios with Virgin Australia

One of the lesser known Avios partnerships – because it involves using Qatar Airways Privilege Club and not British Airways Executive Club – is the one with Virgin Australia.

You can earn and spend Avios on Virgin Australia flights.

You will need to have a Qatar Airways Privilege Club account to take advantage of this.

As well as opening up flights across Australia and New Zealand, you can also travel internationally on Virgin Australia to Tokyo, Bali, Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

How does the Qatar Airways and Virgin Australia partnership work?

Qatar Airways – which adopted Avios as its loyalty currency in 2022 – and Virgin Australia have signed a wide ranging agreement which actually goes beyond Avios. Benefits include:

• You can earn Avios (in Qatar Airways Privilege Club) when you fly with Virgin Australia

• You can spend Avios (in Qatar Airways Privilege Club) on Virgin Australia flights

• If you have Qatar Airways elite status you can use Virgin Australia lounges

• If you have Virgin Australia elite status you can use Qatar Airways lounges

• Other elite benefits (extra baggage allowance, priority check-in, priority boarding and priority baggage delivery) will be offered on a reciprocal basis

You can also earn status points in Qatar Airways Privilege Club when you fly with Virgin Australia, but only if your flight has a QR codeshare flight number.

How does this fit with Qantas and its oneworld alliance membership?

That’s a good question.

Qatar Airways and Qantas are, of course, both members of the oneworld alliance. You can already redeem Avios via Qatar Airways Privilege Club (and of course British Airways Executive Club) for flights on Qantas and – whilst not bookable online on ba.com – QantasLink.

It is odd that there are no apparent competition concerns about Qatar Airways having partnerships with both Qantas and Virgin Australia. However, as I noted above, you can only earn status points in Qatar Airways Privilege Club if your Virgin Australia flight has a QR flight number. Only Qantas flights earn Qatar Airways Privilege Club status points under their own flight code.

Virgin Australia also has a partnership with Etihad, dating back to when Etihad was a shareholder in the airline. This deal appears to be continuing for now. It also works with Air Canada amongst others.

What makes the deal more palatable, politically, is that Qantas has a very close partnership with Emirates, which of course is not in the oneworld alliance. This is why you can earn British Airways Avios and tier points when flying Emirates as long as you book under a Qantas flight number.

How can I earn and spend Avios on Virgin Australia?

Before you can do anything, you will need to open a Qatar Airways Privilege Club account and link it to your British Airways account via the instructions in this article.

This will allow you to:

• move Avios from British Airways Executive Club to Qatar Airways Privilege Club, in order to book Virgin Australia redemptions

• move Avios from Qatar Airways Privilege Club to British Airways Executive Club, in order to move Avios earned from flying Virgin Australia into your BA account

Transfers are 1:1 in both directions, and are instantaneous.

Earning Avios from Virgin Australia flights

This page of the Qatar Airways website shows the Avios earning rate for Virgin Australia flights. You need to look under the ‘Partner Airlines’ tab and not the ‘oneworld’ tab.

You will earn Avios regardless of whether your Virgin Australia flight has a Qatar Airways or Virgin Australia flight number.

The earning rate is, by booking class:

• Business (J, C, D) – 150% of miles flown
• Economy Flex (Y, B, W, H, K, L) – 100% of miles flown
• Economy Choice (R, E, O, N, V, P, Q, T, I, S) – 50% of miles flown
• Economy Lite (M) – 25% of miles flown
• Groups (G) – 50% of miles flown
• Ineligible (X, Z, U)

Spending Avios on Virgin Australia flights

This page of the Qatar Airways website shows the Avios redemption rates for Virgin Australia flights. You need to look under the ‘Partner Airlines’ tab and not the ‘oneworld’ tab.

Unfortunately, Qatar Airways Privilege Club is not the best programme in the world when it comes to booking redemptions on partners. Instead of booking online, you need to log in to your account and complete the partner award request form.

There is no way of checking availability before making a request. The best way to guess would be to create a Virgin Velocity account and search on the Virgin Australia site to see what reward availability the airline offers to its own members. That said, I have heard reports from readers that Qatar Airways can struggle to see seats even when other partners have them.

Qatar Airways no longer appears to have a published award chart for partners. This is what it used to be:

….. but no longer is. You now need to plug your route into the online calculator to get a price. Sydney to Cairns, for example, is 20,000 Avios in Economy (as per the chart) but 44,000 Avios in Business (was 40,000). There are also higher peak date prices.

In an annoying quirk, you cannot book reward travel on Qatar Airways partner airlines if your booking includes an infant (under 2 years old).

Conclusion

Getting Virgin Australia into the Avios fold was a great result. It’s just a shame that virtually no UK Avios collectors, apart from HfP readers, will ever find out that this is now an option.

You can find out more about the Virgin Australia ‘earn and burn’ Avios partnership on the Qatar Airways website here.

(This article is part of our ‘BA Q&A’ series which explains how British Airways Executive Club works.  You can see all of our ‘BA Q&A’ articles here. )

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