The Virgin Atlantic Flying Membership program just lately switched from fixed-rate to dynamically priced redemptions, together with new Saver fares, which supply wonderful charges on off-peak dates. However as with many loyalty applications, discovering the bottom award costs may be difficult.
Fortunately, Virgin Atlantic affords a useful instrument referred to as “Reward seat checker” to simplify the method.
Here is methods to use Virgin Atlantic’s reward seat checker to seek out your subsequent nice flight redemption.
Associated: Flexibility is essential: Why I (largely) just like the Virgin Atlantic Flying Membership adjustments
Methods to use Virgin Atlantic’s reward seat checker
First, log in to your Virgin Atlantic account, scroll down and click on “Reward seat checker” alongside the left toolbar.
On the subsequent display screen, enter your origin and vacation spot airports and most popular month of journey, and a calendar will pop up. Here is what I discovered once I looked for flights from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Worldwide Airport (ATL) to London’s Heathrow Airport (LHR) in Could 2025.
The bottom charges are straightforward to identify, denoted by the pink Saver tag.
Nonetheless, these might solely seem on the most cost effective financial system fares; different nice offers could also be present in increased fare lessons.
For example, premium financial system seats can be found Could 5 for less than 29,000 factors, even decrease than the financial system worth the identical day. Examine the pink tags first, but it surely’s value sifting by the calendar for different offers.
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Associated: Is Virgin Atlantic premium financial system value it on the A330-900neo?
You’ll be able to simply toggle between months, too. I discovered way more Saver fares on this route in April than in Could.
One draw back of this instrument is that it solely reveals award seats on Virgin Atlantic-operated flights; accomplice flights are excluded. When inputting your departure and arrival airports, you will discover that the choices are restricted to locations Virgin Atlantic serves.
One other draw back is that you could’t click on on a date from the reward seat checker calendar and see flight choices on that date or the taxes and costs you’d pay. To do these issues and e book your journey, you could return to your account web page and click on “E-book reward flight” on the left aspect, then reenter your search phrases.
Nonetheless, the reward seat checker is a superb start line — it could actually assist you to rapidly slender your search by exhibiting you which of them dates and places are most reasonably priced. For instance, now that I do know there are low cost Saver seats in each financial system and premium financial system April 2, I might enter that date into the reward flight search and see the accessible flights, the itineraries and the related taxes and costs.
Associated: Methods to search flight award availability for the main airways
Backside line
If you happen to’re contemplating reserving an award flight with Virgin factors, make sure to begin the method with the reward seat checker. And at all times verify to see if there is a switch bonus you need to use to save lots of much more factors.
For example, you’ll be able to presently get 40% further Virgin factors while you switch factors from American Categorical Membership Rewards. On account of a switch bonus, one TPG employees member just lately booked a lie-flat seat to London for simply 21,000 factors.
