Delta opens a lot of business seats for Virgin Points but taxes are insane

Delta Air Lines is known for being extremely stingy with premium cabin award space across the Atlantic, so a big seat drop yesterday is worth a look.

It’s especially interesting because Delta flies to Edinburgh, giving a direct option to the United States using Virgin Points.

What I hadn’t noticed, unfortunately, is that Virgin Atlantic has started charging insane levels of taxes for Delta redemptions.

I don’t use words like ‘insane’ lightly, but tell me if you disagree.

Take a look at this:

Business class (Delta One) rewards between Edinburgh and Boston cost 115,000 Virgin Points and £1,845 of taxes and charges.

Yes, £1,845.

Why is this? It’s relatively simple. Virgin Atlantic’s biggest shareholder is Delta. Delta SkyMiles is known for charging insane numbers of miles for reward seats but with low taxes. To stop Delta flyers collcting and booking with Virgin Atlantic instead, Virgin seems to have been persuaded to add ludicrous surcharges to Delta redemptions.

Let’s look at the same flight booked via Flying Blue ….

Here’s what Flying Blue, the Air France / KLM programme, wants for exactly the same flight:

You will need 114,000 Flying Blue miles plus €851 (£728) of taxes and charges.

£728 isn’t exactly a bargain either, but its a bigger bargain that £1,845.

You don’t need to pay £728 though.

Because Flying Blue doesn’t add surcharges on tickets which start in the United States, you can book this trip as two separate flights on two separate tickets.

If you do that:

• ticket one, Edinburgh to Boston, is 57,000 miles plus €512

• ticket two, Boston to Edinburgh, is 57,000 miles plus just €29

…. for a combined taxes and charges figure of €541 (£463). This is a crazy £1,382 less, per person, than Virgin Atlantic wants in taxes and charges.

How do you find these Delta One award seats?

If these taxes and charges figures haven’t put you off, there is an easy way to check Delta One reward availability for the next few weeks.

Click here to visit the seats.aero site, which is a similar US-focused tool to SeatSpy.

On that page, which only looks at Delta seats for the next few weeks, search by ‘Europe’ to ‘North America’. You can filter the results by EDI, LHR and LGW depending on which airport you would fly from.

To find return dates, do a similar search in reverse.

These results are not real time but are a decent guide. It is how I found the examples used above.

Hat-tip to One Mile At A Time.