Virgin Atlantic is My New Best Friend

Why I love Virgin Atlantic for award travel

If you are able to be flexible with your travel dates, I encourage you to investigate Virgin Atlantic for award travel.

After moving to Puerto Vallarta and rediscovering the award travel game, I began looking for ways to save on my return trips to Atlanta.

In Atlanta, Delta is king… and the only airline offering a direct flight to and from Puerto Vallarta.

One-way direct flights to and from Atlanta on Delta can be as low as $300. However, these flights can also be $400… $500… or more if you are travelling with little notice or during peak times. You can purchase these flights with SkyMiles for as little as 22,000 miles (plus taxes of $46 or $87 depending on your direction of travel), but many times these award flights are 27,000, 36,000 or more SkyMiles.

Assuming a low ticket price of $300 and assuming that award taxes are $46, you would receive a value of 1.154¢ per SkyMile.

And in walks Virgin Atlantic.

This same flight with Virgin Atlantic can be found for 12,500 miles plus taxes. My miles are now worth 2.032¢ each. SOLD! Of course, the value would be greater if the flight was $400 or $500.

I have now booked several PVR to ATL and ATL to PVR flights, but I am looking forward to putting my Virgin Atlantic miles to use when travelling to Europe.

Here is an example from earlier this year of a one-way flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam with a cost of $990.

When booked with miles through Delta, you would need to cough up 90,000 miles and $6. You’re points are now worth a little more than a penny each ($0.010933 each)

Now, let’s look at the same flight when booked with miles through Virgin Atlantic.

The same flight… on the same airplane… at the same time now drops to 12,000 miles and $147.10. This allows you penny points to increase in value to over 7¢ each ($0.070241).

As if it couldn’t get any better, I have been able to transfer miles from my Capital One Venture X and Chase Sapphire Preferred directly to Virgin Atlantic with a 30% bonus. My 100,000 mile transfer became 130,000 miles. (If you don’t have either of these cards, you can get them by clicking the links I provided and receive a sign-up bonus of up to 75,000 points).

Virgin Atlantic will show award availability for a week at a time, but only after you have found an available day. If an award flight is not available, you will receive a “Sorry, no reward flights are available for your search. Try using our Reward seat checker to find availability.” message.

Unfortunately, the seat checker tool is very limited. However, I have found a trick to allow you to view a full month availability of award travel after you have found an available day. You simply need to change the URL (web address) in your browser. Here’s an example:

The above “Flexible Dates” search for award travel found an available flight for 12,500 miles and $87. By changing the word “dates” to “calendar” in the URL, you search becomes a “Price Calendar” search.

So, in this example, I changed…
https://www.virginatlantic.com/flight-search/flexible-dates?cacheKeySuffix=d4b4d7d1-15ea-46fc-8531-aed929b01820
to…
https://www.virginatlantic.com/flight-search/flexible-calendar?cacheKeySuffix=d4b4d7d1-15ea-46fc-8531-aed929b01820.

I hope this helps. If so, leave me a comment.

Do you prefer another airline reward program? If so, let me know.