Miles, Companion Tickets and Upgrades

I am a VS Silver Card and Credit Card Holder with sufficient spending on the credit card to qualify for a free Companion Ticket. Also, by way of VS flights and card spending I have accrued 125,000 miles. I would now like to use all these benefits in the most cost-effective way, for a holiday for my wife and myself. However, there seems to be something of a Catch 22 situation if I want to travel other than Economy, inasmuch as VS staff have told me that:

a. I cannot use miles to upgrade the Companion Ticket
b. I cannot book a Virgin Holiday and then use miles to upgrade on the associated flight.

So it would seem that to make use of the Companion Ticket and travel in PE or UC, I have to buy one full fare ticket in that class.

Does anyone have any better idea as to how I can use these benefits in a more efficient way to ensure that I travel in PE or UC?

[Nottingham Nick]

Welcome to V-Flyer Mike.

Unless anyone knows better, if you want to be sure of getting PE / UC without splashing out on at least one ticket, then I think you have to keep on saving those points;)

The isn't so bad really because you have a shed load already.

You haven't said where you want to fly to but PE flights to most US destinations are 50K or 62.5K each. UC flights are 80K, so you already have enough for two PE flights to Boston, New York or Washington DC.

IMHO is isn't really cost effective to book economy flights using FC points.

Full details of the points needed for flights are here:

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/fr ... lights.jsp


Hope this helps

Nick

Hi Captain Mike & welcome aboard V-Flyer

Like Nick says, if you want to use that companion ticket, I don't think there's any way around paying for the full fare ticket (there's a few posts on the subject around - do a search for companion ticket, selecting exact phrase)

You could just scrape the PE return x2 using miles only, but then you'd have no miles and wouldn't earn any miles/TPs on the reward trip either.

If you still want to earn miles/TPs, then IMHO it's probably more efficient to book a cheaper EC or PE return (make sure you get the right fare class) and use miles to upgrade them to PE/UC.
This way you would still earn miles/TPs for your original fare class. You can see a listing of the mileage costs to upgrade here.

HTH

Cheers

Michael

[RichardMannion]

Hi,

You don't have to buy a full fare PE ticket to use the companion voucher or a companion reward using 30k points - you can book a S class ticket which are less than a full W fare.

Of course there is the taxes you have to pay on any reward ticket. To give you an example, I recently bought a S Class PE ticket to MCO for Sept, used 30k miles, and it the end with the taxes for the companion ticket it was just over £1000 - so in essence £500 each. Which is cracking value for PE to MCO, Y was not much less.

Of course, because its a typical revenue fare (the S Class) the person who's name appears on that ticket, will earn normal mileage and TP's.

Or if you want to fly in UC, then one way would be for you both to buy L Class tickets in Economy, and then use 60k miles each to upgrade both ways to UC (obviously you would need to check with FC in advance for upgrade availability in G class), or you could split the class of travel if you didn't want to use 120k miles, so fly one way in PE and one way in UC, which would be an L class ticket plus 40k miles each.

Hope this helps, let us know if you need anymore information.

Thanks,
Richard