Upgrades of cash tickets

[Bob]

Hi all,

hope someone can help / has recent experience with this. Previously under the old flying club system , I was able to upgrade cash tickets on Virgin inc those bought through a travel agency with either points or flying club voucher from the CC. Also when upgrading with points on a cash ticket they used to work off a set price sheet etc which used to be fairly standard supplement. as long as it was a Virgin ticket and Virgin flights it didn’t matter where the ticket was purchased.

I have called and tried to ask them how the system has changed since the new flying club changes but unfortunately haven’t found anyone helpful as of yet.

has anyone had experience / know about below please

– upgrading of cash tickets with points or voucher , is this still possible?

– if upgrading with points how is the points amount required calculated – is it as simple as current cost of the higher cabin were you to make a new booking less cost of cabin of existing booking?

– any restrictions on the types of cash tickets you can upgrade?

many thanks

[Rob]

It is all messy and we are looking for more examples. The last one I saw, the upgrade was based off the Saver cost of the original cabin you are already in and NOT the current reward price.

This means if PE is currently 75k and Upper 100k, and you have a PE ticket, the upgrade is NOT 75k. It is whatever the Saver price of a PE redemption would be (35k?) and so the upgrade is 65k.

Still looking for more examples to prove it works like this though.

I believe anything except Eco Light can be upgraded.

[AL]

My experience from this in the past two weeks. It’s largely as-was, to be honest.

– Any ticket but Economy Light tickets can be upgraded. This includes redemptions, but it will be sent off for repricing against historical fare chart (or so I was told).
– I was able to successfully upgrade a corporate TA-purchased ticket with points and cash taxes, as I always have been able to.
– Rob’s example is analogous to how I paid for my upgrade – H fare upgraded to G for 60,000 plus £489 TFS r/t.

Really, they could do with a way of boosting points, since those of us who earned points balances the hard way under the old system are penalised by the devaluation under the new system. I’m not yet at my basement, but a few more like this would put me close.

[Bob]

thanks Rob

after I posted this message, I re read online and found this https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/gb/en/upgrades-and-extras.html

under the Upgrade with points tab, it states

“If your original booking was paid for fully in money or using Points Plus Money, you’ll pay:
The price in points of your new upgraded seat less the maximum Saver reward seat price for the cabin you’re upgrading from.”

you can click through onto this page https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/gb/en/flying-club/spend-points/reward-flights/saver-reward-seats.html and if you scroll down there are charts under the heading “Maximum Saver reward seat prices”

which suggests yes based on your example, if on LHR JFK for instance , UC is 100k then from premium you would be paying 100k less max saver which would be 17.5k in off peak so upgrade cost would be 82.5k points…

[Bob]

AL wrote:

My experience from this in the past two weeks. It’s largely as-was, to be honest.

– Any ticket but Economy Light tickets can be upgraded. This includes redemptions, but it will be sent off for repricing against historical fare chart (or so I was told).
– I was able to successfully upgrade a corporate TA-purchased ticket with points and cash taxes, as I always have been able to.
– Rob’s example is analogous to how I paid for my upgrade – H fare upgraded to G for 60,000 plus £489 TFS r/t.

Really, they could do with a way of boosting points, since those of us who earned points balances the hard way under the old system are penalised by the devaluation under the new system. I’m not yet at my basement, but a few more like this would put me close.

good to know you upgrade a corporate TA ticket as that’s what I had done previously under old system too

re boosting, is points booster still around? looks like they have removed functionality to do so online ever since they implemented new website look annoyingly

[BahrainLad]

The price to upgrade from Premium Economy to Upper Class is the different between the PE redemption price (i.e. the old standard) and the current UC dynamic price.

Below is what I posted elsewhere based on what I did last week. However my summary would be: if you have a voucher plus plenty of miles you should *always* be able to upgrade a PE ticket thanks to dynamic pricing. This obviously works the more in your favour the further out you book. You don’t have to rely on reward availability being released which to my mind, is a great improvement.

I thought I would recount my experience yesterday of using Virgin points to upgrade two Premium Economy paid round trips to the US.

Trip 1: LHR-JFK / LGA-DCA / IAD-LHR in May (about £900)
Trip 2: LHR-LAX-LHR in September (about £1100)

I’m still VS Gold, and had a “partially used” voucher in my account together with a full voucher. I couldn’t really find much online about what you could do with a ‘partially used’ voucher (they don’t exist under the new scheme) so I was interested to hear what my options were.

First of all I called up about Trip 1. Ideally I wanted to use my partially used voucher to upgrade the outbound if possible. The lady said…”oh yes you can use a partial voucher, it just translates to 75k points not 150k.” She then said the outbound would need 30k of those – because as there was a old-style standard reward seat available it would be the PE->UC difference (i.e. 17,500 to 47,500). I then asked… “would I be able to use the remaining 45k of the voucher towards the return?” (as I knew the return had no reward pricing available and was dynamically priced) and she said “yes, just let me check”. She came back and said…”due to dynamic pricing on the return, it would be a total of 105k for the round trip so you will need to use 30k from your account plus the partial voucher.” So I jumped at that.

Later in the day I called up about Trip 2. I’d checked and UC seats on the flights I was booked into PE on were going for 120k each way (incidentally, my return in PE was showing as 250k one-way…!) After a bit of back and forth with the agent we established that to upgrade both sectors would be 185k (i.e. 240k for UC – 55k of value from PE) so I would need the other voucher (worth 150k) plus another 35k from my account. Again I said go ahead, and all was ticketed in a couple of minutes.

I actually think this is a great result? 1.5 vouchers + 65k this year has got me – in theory – the same value as 2 old vouchers would have done last year *however* I have managed to upgrade every sector at the time of booking, most notably the LAX return. Last year, when I did the exact same two trips during the same weeks (I am going to annual conferences in DC and LA) I could only upgrade the outbound of Trip 1 at the time of booking, the return for Trip 1 I had to do last minute when a seat opened up, and for Trip 2 I couldn’t upgrade anything at all at any point because LAX is so premium heavy and (was?) so tight for award availability.

The only downside was £470 in taxes/fees for each round trip. Which I’m rationalising as £225 per sector for an upgrade.

[Bob]

purchased a ticket today via corporate TA, to the US out in eco, back in premium. Called to upgrade using voucher, it did take time and the first time they came back with a price it was incorrect but in the end the points calculations worked out to pretty much the links I posted further up. current price less the max saver price. Make sure you do the calculations before you call so you know what you should be expecting.

in terms of taxes, to upgrade the ticket to UC both ways they were asking for £675 approx whereas to upgrade to Premium out and UC back it was £435 approx.

lastly points booster looks to be working online and it appears there’s a permanent 3x boost option now @Rob? I asked over the phone they said its not a special offer or anything it’s normal.