The Virgin Atlantic Flying Membership program lately switched from fixed-rate to dynamically priced redemptions, together with new Saver fares, which provide wonderful charges on off-peak dates. However as with many loyalty applications, discovering the bottom award costs could be tough.
Fortunately, Virgin Atlantic affords a helpful instrument known as “Reward seat checker” to simplify the method.
This is the right way to use Virgin Atlantic’s reward seat checker to seek out your subsequent nice flight redemption.
Associated: Flexibility is vital: Why I (principally) just like the Virgin Atlantic Flying Membership adjustments
Find out how 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 following display screen, enter your origin and vacation spot airports and most popular month of journey, and a calendar will pop up. This 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.
Nevertheless, these might solely seem on the most cost effective economic system fares; different nice offers could also be present in increased fare courses.
As an example, premium economic system seats can be found Could 5 for under 29,000 factors, even decrease than the economic system worth the identical day. Verify the pink tags first, nevertheless it’s value sifting via the calendar for different offers.
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Associated: Is Virgin Atlantic premium economic 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; associate 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 charges you’d pay. To do these issues and ebook your journey, you have to return to your account web page and click on “Guide reward flight” on the left facet, then reenter your search phrases.
Nonetheless, the reward seat checker is a superb start line — it might probably assist you shortly slim your search by exhibiting you which ones dates and places are most inexpensive. For instance, now that I do know there are low cost Saver seats in each economic system and premium economic system April 2, I may enter that date into the reward flight search and see the obtainable flights, the itineraries and the related taxes and charges.
Associated: Find out how to search flight award availability for the main airways
Backside line
Should you’re contemplating reserving an award flight with Virgin factors, you’ll want to begin the method with the reward seat checker. And all the time verify to see if there is a switch bonus you need to use to save lots of much more factors.
As an example, you may at the moment get 40% further Virgin factors while you switch factors from American Specific Membership Rewards. Because of a switch bonus, one TPG employees member lately booked a lie-flat seat to London for simply 21,000 factors.