Virgin Flying Club

Louise Potts

Mouseketeer
Joined
Aug 2, 2016
Evening all,

I joined the Virgin Flying club purposely to clock up points to use for Orlando flights but despite having 40,000 points i don't seem to be seeing any flights that suit what i hoped i could get, either i only get the option to reduce the price of the flight by £198 or an actual flight is an indirect flight that takes ages, am i not certain I am using the VFC to my advantage - does anyone have any top tips please?
 
I’ve been a member for years and have never felt like I’ve got a particularly great deal from my points. I tend to use them to pay with ‘points plus £s’ and reduce the price a bit (like you mention) or save them to upgrade to premium economy...though with their various new ‘economy’ tiers I expect my points will soon only buy me ‘one piece of checked luggage’ or something! 🧳

Sorry, that’s not really much help.

That said, I still vastly prefer Virgin Atlantic’s service over BA.
 
the flying club is notoriously bad with Orlando flights. I’ve spoken with them before and, with every other route, the “free” flights that you can get with points are released the same day as the flights. With Orlando they release them at some point after that, so you have to be really lucky to find and grab them.
We gave up our virgin credit card because of this and got an AMEX instead. That way we collect cash back all year that we use towards a flight with any airline, so we’re not stuck with virgin just to try use the air miles up. This month we are flying BA as they were far cheaper than Virgin, whereas we wouldn’t have had that option before.
 


Waste of time, I ended up losing all my points as I couldn’t use them, although I could have saved them if I’d realised or put more effort in.
I use Amex and get £1500 or so cash back a year- much, much better than building up Virgin points on a credit card.
 
I use my points, but, remember that the points does not cover taxes imposed by the government, but, using them to bring down the cost to £198 is a good plan as Orlando seats using miles cost around £225-£250.
Be aware that if you book a flight using miles and you need to cancel you pay a £30 surcharge, which is fine, but, if you've booked a specific seat like an exit seat you won't get that cost refunded. I found this out when I had to cancel my booking for next May. If I remember correctly, if you book either PE or UC you don't pay for seat selection, so you won't lose that on cancellation.
I'm flying out economy to LA and coming back UC via MCO next month for £550 = miles, I can't imagine paying full whack for that. Just remember that you may have to be flexible about dates too as only a limited number are released to the Flying Club. I wanted to fly UC to LA, but, they had no availability at all for miles customers
 


The answer to this is...it all depends!

I’ve done the same thing – got a VA credit card and flying club account in order to collect the points, as my previous cashback card (Amazon) had its rate for non-Amazon purchases slashed. The new rate worked out at about 0.25%. Cashback cards are few and far between now, as people have mentioned Amex is about the only other one left. But Amex isn’t for everyone.

VA flying club points via the credit card work out at 0.5% cashback, e.g. £1000 spent on credit card gives you £5 off a flight. Tesco Clubcard points vouchers converted to VA miles work out at 1.5 times the voucher face value, e.g. £12 in vouchers gives you £18 off a flight. (These rates are from memory – I worked it all out in detail recently, I’ll check later tonight and edit this if I’ve not remembered it correctly).

Yes, if you use a general cashback card like Amex you are free to spend the cashback on whatever product you want, you’re not tied to VA. But if you’re committed to be going to WDW again in the not-too-distant future, you might as well save money this way. It will only be beaten by promotions that give cashback of over 0.5%. For me, VA is really the only practical way of getting to Orlando anyway, I'm not likely to use another airline. Options are limited from Manchester.

At the end of the day. This is *cashback*. It’s a bonus, anything you get is better than nothing! However, of course it’s all a con. Prices are artificially kept artificially high in order to pay for these so-called loyalty schemes (cashback, supermarket point etc). If you don’t play along and take advantage of the loyalty schemes then you lose out because you’re paying the higher prices without getting any benefit. The only way to beat the system is for everyone, en masse, to suddenly stop using loyalty cards, cashback credit cards etc, and shopping around.

I also get the impression that getting “free” flights via miles schemes is not the bargain you think it is. You still have to pay all the taxes etc which may well be half the cost of economy flights. Whereas if you just use miles as part-payment the money comes off the entire amount. So it’s maybe not worth using your points for a free flight and waiting for them to be released and maybe not finding what you want, it may be better value using the same points just as part-payment and in any case certainly worth it for being able to book the flight as and when they’re released generally instead of gambling on the limited availability of free flights. This theory is untested though so YMMV! Perhaps the free flights take this into account so the number of miles you have to get for a free flights excludes the mandatory taxes. I don’t know.

Be careful that you don’t collect more points than you need, if you’ve got other ways of getting cashback. For example, you can only redeem VA miles in batches of 3000, which gives you £18 off. If you know you want to book a flight in 5 months time and can calculate that you can collect miles to get you to the next 3000-mile boundary in 2 months, for the last 3 months you might as well switch to another cashback method as you won’t be able to use the additional miles you collect. Until your next flight of course, but that may well be 5 years away perhaps! As I said, it just depends on individual circumstances and whether it suits you to collect miles via a credit card at any particular point.
 
We have found best way to use ours is cruise across to the US then get a reward flight back to the UK, taxes from the US are less than from the UK so slightly better value. Done that a couple of times now. next week we fly both ways, to MCO in eco then back to Manchester in PE £350 plus miles, supposedly had a cash price of around £1000, not sure how accurate that was but I am happy at £350 incl luggage coming home in PE.
 
Sometimes you can manage to get something. I used ours to get my daughter a return flight at a Christmas that we paid tax only (over £300) but would have cost nearer to £1000 for the dates we were looking at if we hadn't got any miles. When are you wanting to travel?
 
We (Me, Partner, DS 1 & Niece) used our miles for our flights to Orlando this year. Only paid tax (£240) compared to the £750 it would of been for the flight.
We booked our flights the day came out.
 
As others have said, it really depends. We booked back in February (just as the flights came out for January), LGW to MCO, we used our miles (25000 each) and only had to pay taxes. For all 5 of us -2 ad, 3ch - we paid about £900 and we were really happy with this. If you are looking at peak times and school holidays then this will affect availability of the flights, but definitely keep checking. A few years back we wanted to use our miles to go to my sisters wedding in New York, during the summer holidays and fly into New York and out of Boston, and could never seem to get availability for both flights, but eventually we managed to book. Also, my parents have just booked to fly into Las Vegas and back from Los Angeles, and could only get indirect flights for the return leg. They spoke to the Flying Club (who we have always found to be super helpful) and they agreed that if the direct flight became available they would switch my parents to this at no cost, and a few weeks later they did.
 
looking to book flights in October for next year with my miles plus a companion ticket, this should work out cheaper than booking a package surely?
 
looking to book flights in October for next year with my miles plus a companion ticket, this should work out cheaper than booking a package surely?
Would be interested to know what price you get quoted, Companion tickets didn't used to be a cost effect way of going, don't know if it's changed.
I haven't booked a package for years but we don't do standard holidays, like this next trip (we leave Saturday) its 23 nights and 9 different hotels around Florida, I prefer to sort it all myself. Out of season for a standard 14/21 day trip can sometimes be cheaper as a package.
 
Would be interested to know what price you get quoted, Companion tickets didn't used to be a cost effect way of going, don't know if it's changed.
I haven't booked a package for years but we don't do standard holidays, like this next trip (we leave Saturday) its 23 nights and 9 different hotels around Florida, I prefer to sort it all myself. Out of season for a standard 14/21 day trip can sometimes be cheaper as a package.


that's a crazy trip! how come you chose to do so many hotels if you don't mind me asking?

for the packer (flights and hotel with virgin) it would be £2785 but the hotel only option is £1182 so I can't see how I'd pay an extra £1600 for flights as I have roughly 80,000 virgin points plus a free companion ticket to use.. guessing taxes would be roughly £500 so hopefully it will work out alright and I can do the half marathon next October!
 
that's a crazy trip! how come you chose to do so many hotels if you don't mind me asking?

for the packer (flights and hotel with virgin) it would be £2785 but the hotel only option is £1182 so I can't see how I'd pay an extra £1600 for flights as I have roughly 80,000 virgin points plus a free companion ticket to use.. guessing taxes would be roughly £500 so hopefully it will work out alright and I can do the half marathon next October!
It depends which seats they will allow you to obtain a companion seat, some classes and booking codes are excluded (cheaper seats) Not checked for a few years but always found them too expensive.

We don't just stay in one place on our trips anymore, this time we are flying into Orlando for a few days then set off to Vero Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Key West, Naples, Johns Pass, Tampa, St Augustine and finish back in Lake Buena Vista for last 5 nights.
 
Don't loose your points you can cash them in and get money if you can not find a flight.

You need to call customer service to do this as they do not advertise this on there website anymore.
 
Don't loose your points you can cash them in and get money if you can not find a flight.

You need to call customer service to do this as they do not advertise this on there website anymore.
Wow, I didn't know this was an option! Any idea on the cash values?
 

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