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Looks like virgin have decided to increase upper class redemptions by £200 for a return journey…
LHR – JFK – LHR now coming out at £1196.09
LHR – JFK as a one way now £724.29Extortionate pricing in my opinion…
This was mentioned briefly in the forum a few days ago.
Phenomenal increase to an already high fee structure.
As usual, as the smaller scheme, Virgin has been able to slip it’s devaluation in under the radar with little publicity.
Whenever the high virgin fees are criticised (in comparison to RFS), there are many responses defending the fee as being marginally similar to BA if valuing the miles at 1p (if you forget about 241 vouchers), or defending the value compared to a fully flex ticket.
Well… it just isn’t the case anymore that Virgin and BA are comparable on pricing.
If you have plenty of miles in both schemes – Virgin is not attractive on price.
If you have 241 vouchers in both schemes – Virgin is very poor value indeed.The final argument is usually ‘don’t fly with them then’… and, I won’t be. But it’s such a shame as I have collected the miles and I like the airline and the service. Just not THAT much.
I think you have to look really hard to get value from Virgin redemptions. I mean is anyone really paying £1200 in surcharges to fly UC to NYC, even in these days of higher cash prices?
To be fair BA have increased the YQ component to £900 too, so matching VS. Not sure when this happened. RFS makes the direct comparison trickier, but my minimal checking concluded VS is now worse value if considering points equal, but it really needed more effort than I was prepared to invest.
While many cashed their VS miles out to Hilton Honors during Covid in fear of Virgin going bankrupt, I held on to mine. Ironically, I’m now considering cashing them all out to Hilton as I suspect I’d get more value there due to Virgin’s excruciating YQ.
I am travelling to the US next March and would rather fly direct from MAN. These ridiculous surcharges have got me considering using my cc voucher to upgrade a Virgin holidays booking, and saving my points for another time. Surcharges to other destinations, e.g. Caribbean, seem to be quite a bit lower.
Do Virgin have a system like BA where you can mix and match car, accommodation etc?
According to posts on vflyer this evening the YQ has been reduced back to the previous level.
The power of HFP?!
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