2-4-1 or upgrade?

You’ll pay taxes, fees and charges whichever way you do this, so the question becomes, really, do you want to retain a healthier Virgin Points balance or outlay more cash? You need G class availability, whichever route you go down.

Your Silver status means you don’t pay any points for the second Upper seat, so that’s probably the best use of the voucher. If you upgrade with the voucher, then you’ll have a larger cash outlay that you could have avoided by using it as a Companion Voucher.

Your Silver status lets you gift unwanted vouchers to other Flying Club members. Get their Flying Club numbers, call Flying Club and ask them to gift a voucher to the other member. It takes two minutes. You need to have done this, of course, before the voucher expires. Otherwise, take a trip to the US with it – you can get to the East Coast in Y for £280 return and 20,000 points (approx.).

AL wrote:

Your Silver status means you don’t pay any points for the second Upper seat, so that’s probably the best use of the voucher. If you upgrade with the voucher, then you’ll have a larger cash outlay that you could have avoided by using it as a Companion Voucher

Bit confused by this…

Assuming the OP is using the vouchers on a points redemption there is no difference in cash outlay however they use them (companion or upgrade) to get two UC seats, or indeed if they were to use no vouchers at all (points balance allowing of course).

It won’t be possible to book flights for June ’24 by April ’23, so short of being able to renew the Silver status for another year it will either be a case of using vouchers for upgrade, or 2for1.5. The former almost certainly makes more sense in that case especially given they have plenty of vouchers and can therefore use two to book both seats in UC at the PE points rate.

mrcrsearle wrote:

I just booked two return UC to Miami. 95k airmiles, one companion voucher & just under £2k in taxes for both of us.
Flights were roughly £3k each if paid with cash.

I thought it would if been two vouchers but the one. Worked out great.

Thanks for your replies.

Bargain 😂

mrcrsearle wrote:

My question really is should it be two companion vouchers?

No, just one as you’re using it as a companion voucher with Silver status which gets you a redemption return for two using the points normally required for one.

You could have got it down to 90k points by using vouchers for ‘upgrade’, i.e. UC for the normal PE points requirement – with the same £2k cash. However, that would have required two vouchers.

That’s a good trade-off if you’re still planning to use the other vouchers for the honeymoon trip in June ’24.

Without your Silver status it would have been 142.5K points plus one voucher (or still 90K points plus two).

The thing that makes it less of a bargain is the £1K each taxes and fees.

For comparison, if you had a BA Amex 2for1 voucher, you could fly the same route in CW for only £450 cash each, albeit that you’d need 180K Avios instead of 95K Virgin Points. You could do it with 90K Avios, but that requires a huge £1.7K each in cash.