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Hi just looking for some advice on which is the best points scheme between Virgin Flying Club and KLM Flying Blue. Which offers the best value for your points/money?
Background is that currently we’ve got a few thousand Virgin points and a few KLM (this one is a household account) points.
Going forward, we want to try to consolidate/ earn all of our in just one of these schemes.
Our local airport is predominantly served by KLM, so it would be KLM flights (and it’s associated airline Eastern Airways) that we would be using the points for.
We don’t soley fly with KLM though. We often use BA fights, so our KLM points do not always accrue quickly and we would usually need to pay with a mixture of cash and points.
Any help/thoughts would be appreciated.
Thsnk you
If you have a stash of AF/KLM Flying Blue you can take advantage of their dynamic pricing and buy tickets unavailable through Virgin. Occasionally this is worthwhile. Air France also have partners outside of the SkyTeam alliance, and some of these allow earn/burn of points, and fly interesting places (Etihad for instance).
If you have Virgin points similarly you can book dynamically priced Virgin redemptions unavailable to AF/KLM, and again, sometimes this is a good return on your miles versus paying cash. Virgin has one notable non-alliance partner, ANA, but finding redemption availability is damn-near impossible.
You can book SkyTeam flights with AF/KLM or Virgin miles, but the rates are different. Notably, I’ve found redemptions on AF/KLM can require fewer points when booked with Virgin miles than with AF/KLMs own mileage currency.
I’d stick with Virgin if you think you are likely to want to redeem to/from the USA or India. Otherwise AF/KLM has more options to burn your miles. If you have a specific SkyTeam partner route you are interested in maybe price it up on both to see what is easier to achieve? For example London to Hanoi with Vietnam in Business is 77k FlyingBlue but 85k Virgin.
Thank you for the advise, it’s much appreciated
You can book SkyTeam flights with AF/KLM or Virgin miles, but the rates are different. Notably, I’ve found redemptions on AF/KLM can require fewer points when booked with Virgin miles than with AF/KLMs own mileage currency.
A concrete example — for a summer booking I was looking at today Shanghai PVG to London LCY on KLM in Business via Amsterdam AMS on KLM.
122,000 Virgin
174,500 Flying Blue… despite the connection in AMS on the way to London, the PVG to AMS flight direct flight alone cannot be booked for Virgin miles at all, and for Flying Blue you’ll need 208k miles. I suspect this is what is known in the trade as “married segment pricing”.
The cheapest I’ve seen on this route in Business with Flying Blue is 95,500.
You can book SkyTeam flights with AF/KLM or Virgin miles, but the rates are different. Notably, I’ve found redemptions on AF/KLM can require fewer points when booked with Virgin miles than with AF/KLMs own mileage currency.
A concrete example — for a summer booking I was looking at today Shanghai PVG to London LCY on KLM in Business via Amsterdam AMS on KLM.
122,000 Virgin
174,500 Flying Blue… despite the connection in AMS on the way to London, the PVG to AMS flight direct flight alone cannot be booked for Virgin miles at all, and for Flying Blue you’ll need 208k miles. I suspect this is what is known in the trade as “married segment pricing”.
The cheapest I’ve seen on this route in Business with Flying Blue is 95,500.
The cheapest for PVG to LCY with Flying Blue miles is 85,000 + EUR215.51 which is available on quite a few days in July, for example. But on other dates in July you can pay over half a million miles.
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