Card voucher – adding a return leg later

[Rob]

Hi

I realised that I don’t actually understand the process of adding a return leg to an existing Virgin Atlantic one way booking, either with or without a credit card voucher being involved. Once Maldives launches and the route gets more publicity I think it will become a more common question with people trying to grab seats a year in advance.

If anyone has done this, could they post a) how easy it was to get the call centre to do it, b) any issues with the call centre correctly working out the extra taxes and c) whether the £30 change fee was charged.

Also interested to know if anyone has booked the return leg at 5am for full points and then tried to get a 50% refund (a la BA) by merging it into an existing 241 voucher one-way later. I suspect this isn’t possible.

Thanks
Rob

[AL]

In my experience, this tends to be down to the agent you get on the phone – there’s a good reason that the Swansea crowd are generally the best to deal with, and this is one of the times that they excel.

The process is the same, whether a voucher, points or neither is used. It’s also listed as the way to do it in section 3 of the card terms, at https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/credit-cards/vaa-cards/terms/reward.jsp. The trick is to add the second sector to the existing PNR, which will force the agent to send it to ticketing for validation. The agent will be able to approximate taxes (usually accurately, in my experience). Ticketing should then recalculate the TFS, and the value they come out with will come back the same as the quote on the phone. If there’s discrepancy, which I’ve only had once, then it won’t be re-ticketed (and, you can see this in the booking as no ticket number will appear for the new sector).

I have made a number of changes in the past to VS tickets, and haven’t been charged the £30 fee for additions, only for removals or modifications.

My understanding is that the 241 needs to be added at the point of booking, not afterward, although I can’t see anything about that (and haven’t yet read the full terms of carriage).

[Travel Strong]

I did this *without* a voucher and the phone agent was not familiar with the process and was really keen to just give me a new PNR for the return – assuring the price would be the same.

I politely asked if they could just give it a go putting it on the same booking/PNR, explaining that I expected the taxes to be significantly less if done that way – they obliged and they were genuinely shocked that there was a price difference.

My takeaway was that they cannot be doing this often.
… but they can add on a return leg with ease if you ask it to be done in a certain way.

So
A) mostly easy (if you direct them carefully)
B) taxes only correctly calc’d when I directed them to one PNR
C) I think I did pay the £30 fee last time, but I had it waived on some other changes in the past.

… no voucher experience though.

NOTE: my situation was the other way round… had the *return* booked (paid taxes in $) and added a reward outbound when it came available later. So my round trip taxes were also in $, unusually for a UK round trip.