Virgin: “25% of flights will not have any Saver seats available”

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

• LarsVG says:

  2 Nov2 November 13:14

  I have two vouchers which obvs will now only be worth 75k points each as I’m red. I spent ‘half’ of one voucher on a one way upgrade in July – does anyone know whether that voucher is now void or will it be worth 37500 points?

  • r* says:

    2 Nov2 November 14:55

    Other half of the voucher is worth 37500.

  • NorthernLass says:

    2 Nov2 November 15:26

    Opinion over on Flyertalk is that any “half” vouchers will now be voided.
    Is there any official confirmation either way?

    • Mark says:

      2 Nov2 November 16:01

      I thought I saw something saying existing half vouchers would be honoured but that it will no longer possible to use half a ‘virgin’ (new) voucher. 🙂

      Can’t remember where I read it though.

      • LarsVG says:

        2 Nov2 November 16:18

        Thanks all!

    • r* says:

      3 Nov3 November 01:42

      https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/sa/en/flying-club/spend-points/reward-flights/reward-vouchers.html

      If you have a part-used voucher, you can use the rest any time until it expires, for 50% of the value a new Flying Club reward voucher is worth based on your tier status (Red – up to 37,500 points, Silver or Gold – up to 75,000 points).

      • LarsVG says:

        3 Nov3 November 05:58

        👍🏽

• Krispy says:

  2 Nov2 November 14:15

  Unpopular opinion, but for someone who flies outside of school holidays, I’ve found plenty of availability for LHR-SFO, BGI and other destinations for around 9k-16k each way in economy when including taxes, comparing to cash prices gives a value of a point at around 1.5p-1.7p

  Is this where the new value of the point is?

  • r* says:

    2 Nov2 November 15:03

    No.

    • Krispy says:

      2 Nov2 November 15:16

      Don’t get this. I agree the changes aren’t good, but if you’re flexible there’s deals to be had

      Eg.

      LHR to SFO return
      Friday 15th Aug to Weds 27th Aug
      In premium
      60,500 points and £510 fees

      Versus £1605 in cash

  • Rob says:

    2 Nov2 November 15:29

    In general people who read this site (or indeed collect lots of Virgin Points) aren’t looking to spend 24 hours in economy flying to San Francisco and back.

    • Roy says:

      2 Nov2 November 16:22

      To be fair most people would probably schedule some time in SF between the two flights 😀

    • Janick says:

      2 Nov2 November 16:27

      Don’t think statement can be used as widely as you deem.

      SF, LAX, LAS never had anywhere near the amount of « extra » upper class reward seat availability than the guaranteed as to the likes of JFK for example.

      So I think a lot of long time members who collect points would fly economy or premium economy

      • James says:

        2 Nov2 November 16:34

        Agree, 4 seats to yourself in the back of the plane is quite comfortable, leaving the suckers up front to foot most of the bill.

    • Krispy says:

      2 Nov2 November 17:06

      I’ll take the win as a minority then!

• Sean says:

  2 Nov2 November 16:54

  I have cancelled and rebooked a return flight Heathrow-Dulles, end January/start February. Originally 95000 points, got new flights for 58000 so saving of 35000. Fees of £1018 refunded excluding £30 administration side. New fees cost £669. So came in at saving of £319. Bought some Virgin points recently with ‘70% extra free’. So in reality paid approximately £1200 for upper class return. Not bad in my opinion and both flights on a Neo 300 so happy days.

  • Richard Coppard says:

    2 Nov2 November 17:15

    Sean How easy was it to do ? Did you call and what number ?

    • Sean says:

      2 Nov2 November 17:44

      Hi Richard the difficult part was getting through on the phone line. Was unable to cancel the original booking online. Got through on 0344 209 2272 though the menu same as on 0344 874 7747.
      Calling late seems better with Virgin and 2272 is best line.
      Cancelled by phone late on Friday night and rebooked online after midnight to avoid admin problems. Dulles – Heathrow risen to 47500 pts at 9.00am this morning.

• Roy says:

  2 Nov2 November 17:35

  To be fair most people would probably schedule some time in SF between the two flights 😀

• Roy says:

  2 Nov2 November 17:43

  Just to follow up on the psychological impact, I see so many people who just look at a few dates and see the high prices and assume Virgin Points have been devalued by a factor of 4.

  I think they would have done so much better if the “saver” term wasn’t used at all, and instead the new, expensive revenue-based redemptions were hidden by default. By all means have a button to open up additional seats and show those, but not by default.

  But, of course, they didn’t want to do that because it doesn’t fit the “all seats available for redemption” narrative that they’re using to try to bury the news of getting rid of guaranteed seats.

  Personally, I think they should have just come clean and taken the flack for that – the PR fallout from people misunderstanding the new system will be far worse.

  • Rob says:

    2 Nov2 November 18:00

    Totally agree.

    There was some justification for dropping the guaranteed seats rule too. There are only 16 Upper Class seats on some of the ‘leisure’ A350 aircraft IIRC, and nothing to compare to the 70+ seat cabins on the BA 777 fleet. They could have spun it.

    • Roy says:

      2 Nov2 November 19:04

      Of course this is bad for those who took advantage of the guaranteed seats on popular routes/dates by booking exactly 331 days in advance. But, as another poster commented, this is a necessarily a rather small group of people – even if heavily represented in HfP comments.

      It’s not clear at all to me at the moment that most people outside that group will be negatively effected at all – and some may benefit. Yet most of them seem to be up in arms and many will, I suspect, now concentrate on Avios instead of Virgin Points.

      My personal use case xof air miles is premium travel to the East Coast of America, with flexible dates but generally booking at shortish notice and valuing the fact that the tickets are cancelable should the schedules of the friends I’m visiting change at short notice.

      Given a significant points balance (plus a couple of vouchers), I was concerned about the changes, of course, but looking at what’s actually available I’m cautiously optimistic that I’m actually winner here. As a short notice booker with some flexibility over dates, the cheaper saver redemptions look like they will have real value for me – whereas I’d have to be pretty lucky for a sale to be running at the time I’m planning a trip.

      But I’m not sure even the winners here, in the main, understand that that they are winners – and, if that’s true, that’s a real PR fail on the part of Virgin.

      • Rob says:

        2 Nov2 November 20:13

        I don’t want to suggest you’re talking nonsense but:

        New York – no Saver Upper Class in November
        Boston – no Saver Upper Class in November
        Washington – a handful of Saver dates (57k one way) in mid November
        Los Angeles – no Saver Upper Class in November
        San Francisco – no Saver Upper Class in November
        Las Vegas – no Saver Upper Class in November

        The absolute very last thing you will get in the new system are cheap last minute rewards.

        • Roy says:

          2 Nov2 November 20:30

          Maybe my mistake then is trusting SeatSpy. I will have to have a more thorough look using the Virgin booking site – which is, of course, going to be tedious – but I was fairly sure I saw cheap flights on the Virgin sure to Washngton (autocorrect wanted to change that to Warrington LOL) when I looked – which is the route I care most about.

          If what you’re saying is really true then there’s a much bigger change than just the loss of guaranteed seat availability. I hope you’re wrong (but I realise you may well not be)..

        • Rob says:

          2 Nov2 November 20:38

          You can see a month at a time here, no need for SeatSpy: https://travelplus.virginatlantic.com/reward-flight-finder

        • Roy says:

          2 Nov2 November 20:45

          Ok, you may be right. There is certainly not-completely-ludicrously priced availability to East Coast destinations in November, but maybe a dearth of actual savers to most destinations.

          There were certainly deals to be had in January, though, when I last looked – which I admit doesn’t exactly fit my usual “shortish notice” booking pattern. But certainly doable, even with the increased cancellation fee.

        • Rob says:

          2 Nov2 November 20:55

          Weird that there are cheap seats to a snowed-in, well-below-freezing US East Coast in January.

          Remember that Virgin ran annual 50% off reward sales to fill seats every January.

        • Roy says:

          2 Nov2 November 21:03

          Ok, you’re right Rob, I screwed up – and Seatspy is not to blame.

          I mistakenly set the slider in Seatspy to the old return points cost rather than the old one-way points cost.

          Still, I’m not sure I entirely believe what you say about last minute availability – the whole point of a rewards scheme is to fill seats that otherwise wouldn’t be sold, and you really only have a good idea that’s the case when you’re fairly close in. Unless they’re filling every plane with cash sales, there really should be late points availability…

          Much of November is probably a bit of an outliier, anyway, because of Thanksgiving. Let’s see how this pans out….

    • Roy says:

      2 Nov2 November 20:11

      Would also add that I’m hopeful that the removal of the ex-US premium on the carrier surcharge will make it much easier to mix and match BA and Virgin, when availability (or fight times) might favour such an itinerary.

      BA outbound and Virgin return was previously a non-starter, and looks like it may be viable now.

• Ben says:

  2 Nov2 November 17:58

  Doesn’t dynamic reward pricing effectively turn this into the “Cash and Miles” system? I.e. All reward seats are basically cash seats.

  • Rob says:

    2 Nov2 November 17:59

    Not if you book a Saver seat. For the rest, yes.

    • Ben says:

      2 Nov2 November 18:07

      Interesting, what makes the saver seats different?

      • Rob says:

        2 Nov2 November 18:35

        They are the ones which Virgin knows will never be sold in a million years and so they don’t really have a cash value to the airline.

        • ChasP says:

          2 Nov2 November 18:47

          if they really want to fill them then a simple way of finding them would be a start !

        • Janick says:

          3 Nov3 November 10:51

          I had interesting case.

          Booked LHR-JFK in May, very late flight arriving JFK after 9pm. 29k upper class.
          An earlier flight was 140k points one way.
          Checked last night and earlier flight was reduced to 29k.
          So quickly changed the booking albeit £70 pp change fee.

          What is weird is the original saver flight, already had 11 reserved seats in UC cabin. Whilst the earlier flight had 0 reserved seats.
          I think their algorithm needs fine tuning. Why, when a flight is 30% occupied are there saver seats, but on a empty cabin (based on 0 reserved seats) and Z cash fare, was the earlier flight 4x more expensive in points.

      • Roy says:

        2 Nov2 November 19:16

        The Saver seats are the ones that they would have released anyway under the old rules – but without the guaranteed availability.

        The revenue-based rewards are largely seats that previously wouldn’t have been bookable on points at all.

        • ed_fly says:

          2 Nov2 November 20:43

          It’s quite clearly as rob’s said. Saver rewards will be the seats that they’re predicting based on their modelling that they wouldn’t sell for cash at rates which would make miles overly expensive for them. No airline operates at 100% loading year round (I would suspect and based on my own experience), though some flights are clearly oversubscribed. Virgin are blocking saver reward seats on flights they anticipate will sell out at profitable cash fares, and then offering saver seats on the flights which would go out with empty seats otherwise.

• Fazzy Bear says:

  2 Nov2 November 18:22

  Any way of getting through to anyone with Virgin basic status? Tried over 3-4 times for roughly one hour each time. Live Chat no response.

  • r* says:

    3 Nov3 November 02:17

    I finally got thru to someone on chat only for them to accuse me of lying when I said there was no way to cancel the flight on the website (it throws an error) then they disconnected when I asked if it could be raised to a supervisor, lol.

• Richard Coppard says:

  2 Nov2 November 18:25

  Sean, I got through on the number you suggested and it only took 25 mins. The call handler did it all for me on the same call. So it came in for us 27,000 miles returned and a difference in taxes of nearly £500.

  • Sean says:

    2 Nov2 November 23:14

    Sounds good. I’d have asked the guy I spoke with to do it all for me but had a bad experience with BA recently where they didn’t secure the new seats properly before making the cancellation and it took days to sort. My saved miles will pay for business Dublin-Paris return with AF and a KLM business Belfasr-Amsterdam return. The refund to my credit card will cover the fees for both and pay for a cash Business Belfast-London return for a day’s shopping come BA’s next European sale. Just a pity it won’t pay for the shopping itself.

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