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Virgin Flying Club dynamic pricing in Upper Class: our analysis (Part 1)

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It’s just over a week since Virgin Flying Club moved to dynamic pricing on Virgin Points redemptions.

Now that the transition has had time to bed in, we thought we’d take a look at how redemption pricing has changed for Virgin Atlantic flights.

To give credit where it is due, Virgin Flying Club has built a very handy tool for finding Saver pricing. Called Reward Seat Checker, you can see pricing and availability for every route month-by-month. Saver fares are meant to be marked with a red tag but the IT is buggy.

We used this tool to look at the impact of the changes on Virgin Flying Club redemptions in Upper Class.

We have assumed that you have no interest in redeeming for dynamically priced ‘any seat’ rewards and are only interested in ‘Saver’ seats which are priced at no more than the ‘old’ reward prices. ‘Dynamic’ seats in Upper Class cost up to 700,000 Virgin Points + £1,000 of taxes and charges return.

For simplicity we only looked at departures from London Heathrow.

The work was done before the rumours of the cancellation of Accra and Tel Aviv were reported. We may get some clarity on this story during Monday.

We believe this data to be correct but errors could have crept in, so please double-check what we say. ‘Dynamic pricing’ also means that what was correct last Thursday may not still be correct today.

The results, in summary

We’ll show you the data in a minute, but let me summarise it for you:

Forget Virgin Points if you want to fly Upper Class at short notice

Only four routes have ANY flights with an Upper Class Saver seat between 8th and 30th November:

  • Boston (1 day)
  • Orlando (4 days)
  • Tampa (2 days)
  • Washington DC (4 days)

This is shocking. 24 routes do not have a single Upper Class Saver seat available on any flight on any day between 8th and 30th November.

New York JFK, with multiple flights per day, doesn’t have a single Upper Class Saver seat on any day between 8th and 30th November 2024.

For Upper Class, you should probably only collect Virgin Points if you want to fly to:

  • Accra
  • New York
  • Washington
  • Bangalore
  • Boston
  • Mumbai
  • Riyadh

All other routes have NO Saver seats in Upper Class on at least 66% of dates where there is a flight.

Forget Virgin Points if you want to fly Upper Class to Canada, Dubai, the Caribbean, Maldives or South Africa

The routes below have fewer than 25 days OUT OF THE NEXT 331 DAYS where you can get an Upper Class Saver seat outbound:

  • Antigua
  • Barbados
  • Cape Town*
  • Dubai*
  • Grenada
  • Johannesburg
  • Las Vegas
  • Los Angeles
  • Male / Maldives*
  • Nassau / Bahamas*
  • St Lucia*
  • St Vincent & The Grenadines
  • Toronto*
  • Trinidad & Tobago*
  • Turks & Caicos

Routes marked with a ‘*’ do not operate all year, but it is still worrying to see fewer than 25 days with Upper Class Saver seats.

Forget Upper Class if you want to fly in August with your children on Virgin Points to these places:

The following routes have NO outbound Upper Class Saver seats, at all, in August 2025:

  • Antigua
  • Barbados
  • Grenada
  • Las Vegas
  • Los Angeles
  • St Vincent & The Grenadines
  • Toronto
  • Turks & Caicos

There are seven days or fewer in August 2025 with an Upper Class Saver seat to Miami, Montego Bay, Orlando and Tampa.

On the positive side, there are 14 Virgin Atlantic routes which have 10+ days in August 2025 with Upper Class Saver seats.

The reality is that we have sugar-coated the results above

This is because:

  • we don’t know how many Upper Class Saver seats are available on a particular date. If you are travelling with someone else and need two seats, you will have fewer options than we highlight above. If you travelling as a family, it will be even worse.
  • we are only looking at outbound flights from Heathrow. If a route only has a handful of Saver dates flying out, the chance of you finding a return flight on a suitable date is slim.

With that said, let’s move on to the data.

Where and when can you find Upper Class Saver availability?

The chart below lists all 32 Virgin Atlantic routes together with the numbers of days each month where outbound Upper Class Saver seats are available.

If you have children, you need to look at April and August to see where you could go in Upper Class during the Easter and summer school holidays. However, let me caveat that – our analysis is based on days with ONE Upper Class Saver seat. There are not necessarily two, three, four or more available.

The number of dates shown for seasonal routes is arguably inflated. There are often seats in the final days before flights cease, but passengers have no way of getting back on Virgin Atlantic. All 16 dates with Dubai availability, for example, are in March and services end on 28th March.

Cancun is excluded because seats are not bookable until later this month. The first flight is 19th October 2025.

What does the table below show?

  • We list all 32 routes alphabetically
  • Across the top are columns for the next 11 months, starting with November 2024 and ending with September 2025. Data for October 2025 is not available because of the 11 month booking window.
  • For each route we show the number of days where at least one Upper Class Saver seat is bookable FROM Heathrow
  • Our analysis only looks at OUTBOUND seats and not inbound
  • A blank space means that flights do not operate that month. A zero means that flights are operating but that no Upper Class Saver seats are available.
  • This data was correct as of 7th November. Seat numbers for November 2024 are for dates from 8th November.
NDJFMAMJJASTotal
Accra2626312925140
Antigua021001000004
Atlanta0822261911331126111
Bangalore03101521212219202518177
Barbados00001350000018
Boston182326192028309205190
Cape Town0112307
Delhi00000161716261683
Dubai00001616
Grenada000000000000
Jo’burg02002102012019
Lagos00001151717231716108
Las Vegas06111300000021
Los Angeles0048900000021
Male0000077
Miami0210121801607763
Montego Bay0456000015324
Mumbai024823222216113123165
Nassau03115
New York JFK08262828283130152914238
Orlando4214102001747372
Riyadh21271528141192
San Francisco02753200010130
Seattle071223231000012087
St Lucia0200911
St Vin / Grenadines000000000000
Tampa24232724443073101
Tel Aviv013217221662
Toronto10000012
Trinidad & Tobago01449
Turks & Caicos014400000009
Washington DC41822233128262812117222

In Part 2 tomorrow ….

In the second part of this article, published tomorrow, we will dig into the Upper Class reward seat data in more detail.

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How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (June 2025)

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You can choose from two official Virgin Atlantic credit cards (apply here, the Reward+ card has a bonus of 18,000 Virgin Points and the free card has a bonus of 3,000 Virgin Points):

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Category

Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club

Comments (154)

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

  • Roy says:
    11 Nov11 November 12:16

    With the proviso that I’m looking via Seatspy, so it’s possible the root of what I’m seeing may lie there, but…

    I think the Virgin algorithm is just broken. A couple of weeks ago there was almost almost no outbound availability to Washington showing in November/December but lots of very cheap availability in the return direction.

    Then a week later a bunch more outbound availability appeared for December and late November, but pretty much all the return availability had disappeared.

    This just makes no sense.

    • memesweeper says:
      11 Nov11 November 12:57

      It might be short term IT implementation issue at their end, or an issue with Seatspy.

      Looking at their own tool for days with at least one saver LHR IAD:

      November, UC, out from London: 0 (but three dates are sub 58k so should be flagged as Saver?)
      November, UC, return to London: 0

      December, UC, out from London: 16
      December, UC, return to London: 1

      • memesweeper says:
        11 Nov11 November 12:58

        … and a pattern like that, say 4:1 biased in favour of availability out from London:back to London is what I’d expect for east coast flights, as more people want the lie-flat seat overnight.

        • Roy says:
          11 Nov11 November 13:03

          But what doesn’t make sense is that a couple of weeks ago there was virtually nothing outbound, but savers available every day in the return direction – often at 29k

      • Roy says:
        11 Nov11 November 13:52

        I presume those 57k flights are not showing up as savers because these are off-peak days in the calendar, so they’d have to be 47.5k or less to be savers.

        However, the calendar is meaningless in this brave new dynamically-priced world – they should just label everything that’s no more than the old peak award as saver.

        • Rhys says:
          11 Nov11 November 15:12

          Yes, it’s strange that it seems to continue showing seasonal pricing when under the dynamic system it really doesn’t matter any more.

  • aq.1988 says:
    11 Nov11 November 13:23

    I did some spot checking of random dates and routes that had saver availability. If I could find 1 seat, I was also able to find 9 (all at the saver rate). I did it on 5 or 6 different routes and dates. That’s definitely an improvement over the previous guaranteed 2 in UC.

    • LittleNick says:
      11 Nov11 November 13:40

      Please share which routes?

      • aq.1988 says:
        11 Nov11 November 13:54

        Dubai, Riyadh, JFK, DC and Boston were some of the routes I checked.

        • Rob says:
          11 Nov11 November 14:12

          I can replicate it on Dubai BUT because its the end of the schedule thats perhaps not surprising. Can’t replicate it on core routes.

  • Andy says:
    11 Nov11 November 13:36

    Was just looking at a few late December dates to see the impact of the dynamic pricing, and noted that Economy or PE can now require more miles than Upper. In one case, PE was 1,000,000 VS miles!

    • Nico says:
      11 Nov11 November 13:59

      The algo needs sone calibration

    • Rhys says:
      11 Nov11 November 15:11

      Not sure that’s possible – there appears to be a fixed ceiling of 250,000 points one-way in Premium.

    • Ever says:
      12 Nov12 November 00:37

      I noted the same but only on the app. There seemed to be technical issue with the app. The miles needed are sometimes much higher vs website and with economy unreasonably higher than upper.

  • S says:
    11 Nov11 November 14:03

    Look at just how bad it is for parents needing school holiday availability. It’s made substantial points that we thought could be used (with some planning) effectively useless. It’s appalling. The changes are totally asymmetric with exponentially more points being needed on ‘demand seats’ but few saver seats and the reduction to saver seats far smaller than the increasing across ‘demand pricing’. The increased pricing renders the companion reward voucher largely useless.

  • Roy says:
    11 Nov11 November 14:08

    So Virgin said, ahead of the change, “We expect the large majority of seats available today to be at the same prices or lower in the future”

    Is there any world in which this is actually true?

    • Rhys says:
      11 Nov11 November 15:10

      You have to remember that every seat is now available. A lot of flights would have had zero availability before. It only guaranteed two Upper Class seats per flight available. Now they are available, but at a cost.

      • louie says:
        11 Nov11 November 16:01

        So not “to be at the same prices or lower in the future” then.

        • Nico says:
          11 Nov11 November 17:00

          If there was no price before, any is better arguably for some twisted marketing

      • Roy says:
        11 Nov11 November 17:51

        Yeah, I understand that. But short notice availability seems substantially poorer than in the past, too, which leads me to question whether the “large majority” of previously available seats really are available as savers.

        • Nico says:
          11 Nov11 November 19:46

          I am with you and they killed short notice redemption. BA trying to fill plane that way if needed, which makes sense to me, unless they hope to find price insensitive last minute corporate clients. What they miss is that if customer do not want virgin points, they’ll go elsewhere.

  • Clare Pooley says:
    11 Nov11 November 14:19

    Own goal. If i can’t take the family on holiday on my points any more I’ll be switching all my business travel to BA.

  • Michael says:
    11 Nov11 November 14:44

    Totally confused with all this,I was quoted 2 months ago an upgrade to premium economy £100 + 9,000 points + return £32 + tax’s from Heathrow to Bridgetown
    Just phoned after 5 days hanging on to be told its now 90,000 points.

  • Shaun L says:
    11 Nov11 November 14:52

    Rob. Have you / are you going to look at Manchester routes ?

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

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