I made a site to help find good value Virgin Atlantic redemptions – vseats.io

[Matlo]

Hi everyone,

As the title suggests, I made a website to help find Virgin Atlantic reward seats.

It’s similar to the existing Virgin reward flight finder but with added functionality, notably:

– Flight Table – Reward flights shown in a table format with the ability to sort and filter for a full year of flights at once. You can add a route and then click the column headers to sort by cheapest reward seats.
– Flight Calendar – A full year calendar view for a given route, with reward seat prices shown. Both outbound and return calendars are shown allowing users to see where the lowest cost flights are through the year.
– Return Flight Finder – This is the main reason I wanted to make the site and is, for me, the most useful feature. For a selected route (or origin airport) you can input the trip length you want and it’ll find the lowest cost outbound and return flight combinations. This is something that is a bit painful to do on the Virgin reward flight finder as you need to click between outbound and return calendars a lot.

Have a look and let me know if this is useful – the site is https://vseats.io/

Some notes:

– The data source for the site is the Virgin Atlantic reward flight finder. This is known to have some errors and shows seats at different prices to the actual booking pages – always click through to validate pricing. There are direct links to the booking pages on the site to help with this.
– The number of seats available aren’t shown on the VA reward flight finder, therefore clicking through to the booking page is required to find this.
– I’m thinking of adding another page that shows recent notable price drops. I’m also open to suggestions on other features that might be useful.
– This site is a hobby project made for fun and I’m only an amateur coder. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I take no responsibility for any incorrect data, bugs or missing features! Please do however let me know if you find any issues or have any general feedback.

Thanks,

matlo

[kiwibrit62]

Very nice – I think you’ve used CPT for JNB in the calendar function. Shame they have not yet added ICN to the finder!

[Tristoph]

This is great, really useful thank you!!

[Skywalker]

@matlo this is superb – you say you’re an amateur coder, but it looks really professional and with what I have tested so far, it works really well.

Will you be charging subscriptions for this?

[Peeps]

I tried it today – absolutely fantastic and just what I was looking for!
Thank you very much for sharing.

[jj]

The ability to order return journeys by price with a range of durations is brilliant.

[masaccio]

Agree the return search is very useful. A filter for number of seats would be good.

I tried a random search for SVD and got UC on October 7-21 as 54+64k but Virgin doesn’t fly those days and the actual numbers close to then are higher.

Of course it could be their data rather than your filtering getting this wrong.

[Jim Utd]

This is really useful and the formatting so much easier than the reward flight finder. Well done!

[Matlo]

Thanks for the comments everyone – great to know that people are finding it useful.

kiwibrit62 wrote:

Very nice – I think you’ve used CPT for JNB in the calendar function. Shame they have not yet added ICN to the finder!

I couldn’t replicate this – It could be that you didn’t press the update calendar button – we’re you by any chance looking at CPT before? Regardless, the update button is probably a bit unnecessary so I might remove that.

Skywalker wrote:

Will you be charging subscriptions for this?

That’s not the intention. If site is popular and the hosting costs increase then I may add some ads or a donation button to cover those costs.

masaccio wrote:

Agree the return search is very useful. A filter for number of seats would be good.

I tried a random search for SVD and got UC on October 7-21 as 54+64k but Virgin doesn’t fly those days and the actual numbers close to then are higher.

Of course it could be their data rather than your filtering getting this wrong.

This is an odd one I couldn’t replicate either – it could again be an update calendar issue. Or it could be out of date data.

Does anyone know when the reward flight finder updates prices? If it updates at midnight then I could set the daily scraper to run earlier on in the day, which would give people the most up to date data earlier.

I’ve also had a request for a light-mode for accessibility, which I’ll try and implement.

Thanks,

matlo

[davefl]

Matlo wrote:

Does anyone know when the reward flight finder updates prices? If it updates at midnight then I could set the daily scraper to run earlier on in the day, which would give people the most up to date data earlier.

I’ve seen it update at least twice a day, sometimes 3 times. There’s one after midnight and then once after lunch but it varies a lot.

[backs999]

This great and will be very useful.

As a software engineer of 20 years I am ashamed I have never made such a tool. If you do require any help then ping me and I would happy to contribute and help it along it’s way!

Cheers,
Al

[Tristoph]

Hi, I’ve been using this loads, it’s great! A couple of ideas

– for the flight table you can choose ‘All Origins’, but you can’t pick Heathrow as the destination (sorry if I’m being blind & it’s there!). That would be really helpful as the inbound flights are usually so much higher so it’s good to be able to see where would be cheapest to fly back from

– I love the return flight finder, would it be possible to filter a country (really the USA!), I’m flexible on where I fly in / out of so pick ‘All Destinations’ but it’s full of Lagos & India, so I have to look through pages to find the cheapest US return

Thanks again :o)

[davefl]

davefl wrote:

I’ve seen it update at least twice a day, sometimes 3 times. There’s one after midnight and then once after lunch but it varies a lot.

To add some data, I’ve seen a PE date that I’m watching go from 29k to 27k to 28k between Sunday morning and 10am today. Then since 10am this mmorning (It’s 12pm now) it’s just gone to 56k.

So no pattern on what time or how often it updates as far as I can see.

[charlie]

Nice work @Matlo
It’s beautiful and the returns table is great. I’ve just added Virgin Atlantic to FlightTimeCalendar – it runs in realtime so you’ll always get fresh data. Happy to compare notes if you want to get in touch?

[Iamsmurphslaw]

Potentially great idea, however for your information I’m currently checking SFO/LHR upper for Feb26 dates and 5,7,10,14 & 17th points are way out. In fact I’d say they’ve never been as low as you’re showing.

Hope it’s just a glitch and I wish you well with the site.

[Matlo]

davefl wrote:

I’ve seen it update at least twice a day, sometimes 3 times. There’s one after midnight and then once after lunch but it varies a lot.

That’s useful to know – I didn’t realise it changed so often. I might re-run the scraper a couple of times a day in that case.

Another example – for Iamsmurphslaw’s SFO-LHR 7th Feb 26 flight below, according to my records this has changed price at least 10 days of the last 2 weeks! Ranging from 41,000 to 59,000 before shooting up to 150,000 today. It could be a bug and incorrect data, or someone has used the tool and booked some of the cheap seats?

backs999 wrote:

This great and will be very useful.

As a software engineer of 20 years I am ashamed I have never made such a tool. If you do require any help then ping me and I would happy to contribute and help it along it’s way!

Cheers,
Al

Thanks Al. Your name and offer of help is somewhat ironic as it was ‘AI’ which wrote most of the code on this site 🙂

Tristoph wrote:

Hi, I’ve been using this loads, it’s great! A couple of ideas

– for the flight table you can choose ‘All Origins’, but you can’t pick Heathrow as the destination (sorry if I’m being blind & it’s there!). That would be really helpful as the inbound flights are usually so much higher so it’s good to be able to see where would be cheapest to fly back from

– I love the return flight finder, would it be possible to filter a country (really the USA!), I’m flexible on where I fly in / out of so pick ‘All Destinations’ but it’s full of Lagos & India, so I have to look through pages to find the cheapest US return

Thanks again :o)

These are good ideas and I’ve been thinking along the same lines. It isn’t particularly useful to know that the 100 cheapest upper class flights are to Bengaluru… I’ll see if a country filter is implementable.

charlie wrote:

Nice work @Matlo
It’s beautiful and the returns table is great. I’ve just added Virgin Atlantic to FlightTimeCalendar – it runs in realtime so you’ll always get fresh data. Happy to compare notes if you want to get in touch?

Thanks charlie. I actually looked up your site again before making this to check you hadn’t already covered Virgin Atlantic. Great work on that – the live seat counts are super useful. As you’re too polite to post the link on this thread, here it is for everyone – https://www.flighttimecalendar.com/. My contact details are over on the site if you want to send over yours. FYI unless I’m missing something it looks like the SFO-LHR and LHR-SFO Feb-26 prices are showing on the opposite calendars.

Thanks again for the kind words and feedback everyone.

[davefl]

Matlo wrote:

#790235| REPORT

Matlo
18 posts
davefl wrote:
I’ve seen it update at least twice a day, sometimes 3 times. There’s one after midnight and then once after lunch but it varies a lot.

That’s useful to know – I didn’t realise it changed so often. I might re-run the scraper a couple of times a day in that case.

It’s even more interesting that the available PE seat count (9) for that date hasn’t changed in the last 3 weeks. So Virgin’s pricing algorithm makes absolutely no sense. Can’t sell them at 27k so we’ll put them up to 56k. Bonkers.

[Iamsmurphslaw]

Thanks @Matlo for explaining the SFO/LHR Feb26 movements.
Actually I now suspect there’s been some flight consolidation on this route again, hence the reason for big increases on some dates.
It’ll be interesting to see what tomorrow brings, as @davefl says the whole thing is BONKERS!

[Matlo]

davefl wrote:

Matlo wrote:

Does anyone know when the reward flight finder updates prices? If it updates at midnight then I could set the daily scraper to run earlier on in the day, which would give people the most up to date data earlier.

I’ve seen it update at least twice a day, sometimes 3 times. There’s one after midnight and then once after lunch but it varies a lot.

Thanks – that’s useful to know. I hadn’t realised it updated so often. Once I have more data there’s probably some interesting analysis to be done on how often the prices change and what the trends are.

Another example – For the 7th Feb 26 SFO-LHR flight @Iamsmurphslaw mentions below, I have that logged as having 10 different prices over the last 2 weeks, ranging from 41,000 to 59,000. It seems to have shot up to 150,000 today. It could be a glitch, or perhaps someone used the tool to find an exceptionally cheap upper and booked it?

Given the volatility I might run the scraper a couple of times per day, depending on costs.

backs999 wrote:

This great and will be very useful.

As a software engineer of 20 years I am ashamed I have never made such a tool. If you do require any help then ping me and I would happy to contribute and help it along it’s way!

Cheers,
Al

Thanks Al – your sign-off and offer of help is a bit ironic as its ‘AI’ that has produced most of the code on this site 🙂

Tristoph wrote:

Hi, I’ve been using this loads, it’s great! A couple of ideas

– for the flight table you can choose ‘All Origins’, but you can’t pick Heathrow as the destination (sorry if I’m being blind & it’s there!). That would be really helpful as the inbound flights are usually so much higher so it’s good to be able to see where would be cheapest to fly back from

– I love the return flight finder, would it be possible to filter a country (really the USA!), I’m flexible on where I fly in / out of so pick ‘All Destinations’ but it’s full of Lagos & India, so I have to look through pages to find the cheapest US return

Thanks again :o)

This is a good idea and one I’ve been thinking about too – I will see if I can add country filters to the drop down. I’ve agree it isn’t actually that useful to know what all the cheapest business class seats are to Bengaluru…

charlie wrote:

Nice work @Matlo
It’s beautiful and the returns table is great. I’ve just added Virgin Atlantic to FlightTimeCalendar – it runs in realtime so you’ll always get fresh data. Happy to compare notes if you want to get in touch?

Thanks Charlie – funnily enough I checked your site before posting this to make sure it didn’t already have Virgin covered. That’s really useful to be able to check seat availability too. My contact details are on the site if you want to drop yours through. Since you are too polite to post the link to your site on the thread, here it is for everyone – https://www.flighttimecalendar.com/ .

FYI I’ve just checked the SFO-LHR Feb-2026 flights on your site and I think the SFO-LHR and LHR-SFO calendars are showing each others data.

[davefl]

davefl wrote:

It’s even more interesting that the available PE seat count (9) for that date hasn’t changed in the last 3 weeks. So Virgin’s pricing algorithm makes absolutely no sense. Can’t sell them at 27k so we’ll put them up to 56k. Bonkers.

This morning it has gone up to 110k, still with 9 seats remaining.

[Matlo]

Excuse my duplicate replies there – I submitted it and it disappeared only to appear half an hour later after I’d written it again…

[davefl]

davefl wrote:

This morning it has gone up to 110k, still with 9 seats remaining.

And now down to 55k. I wont post on this again, but just to give you guys a datapoint that’s 6 changes since Sunday.

[Iamsmurphslaw]

As I suggested SFO is down to one flight daily for Jan/Feb 26 anyway.
This means consolidation of flights on days when there were two, resulting in reward points needed jumping up substantially across the board.
Hopefully will start to see them drop again in coming days as seems to be the norm.

[AndyGWP]

Love this – well done both of you for putting together your respective apps

@Matlo – for the returnfinder, would it be feasible to introduce the ability to specify the cabin for each direction? (ie. outbound upper, return premium) etc?

[MJClapham]

Hi @Matlo

Amazing website. Could you add multi city to the search?