V-Flyer

I might have missed this, but I thought that taxes had come back down from the £1k of last year.

I finally managed to book a companion voucher and a reward seat for Dec '23/ Jan '24 (despite the return Jan '24 leg not showing, reported today on HFP. I thought I had kept missing the availability of the seats).

The contact centre still can't take payment for taxes due to the current issues, but she advised that UC tax is now £1001 each for the return, but I thought they had dropped to c.£800 each. (Still better than paying the £3.8k each that it would have cost if paying cash, so I am not going to be too annoyed)

I read somewhere else that VS (and BA) have both increased their YQ charges again for reward fares recently.

>£1000 for reward G fares is getting insane now....I still think points+money is a much better more valuable way to spend points the days.

You can quite easily bring down a Z fare to towards that cost for roughly the same number of points you spend on a full reward flight plus you then earn the points back with it being a Z fare.


Off topic, but can I ask what the call centre said the 'current issues' actually are? I'm sick and tired of hearing that excuse now from the VS call centre and especially Flying Club over the last several months now. Everything you mention to them and the stock answer is now always 'it's a system issue'????

Whilst VS crew and airport staff are still amazing, the VS call centre including Flying Club is utterly atrocious now

mitchja wrote:I read somewhere else that VS (and BA) have both increased their YQ charges again for reward fares recently.

>£1000 for reward G fares is getting insane now....I still think points+money is a much better more valuable way to spend points the days.

You can quite easily bring down a Z fare to towards that cost for roughly the same number of points you spend on a full reward flight plus you then earn the points back with it being a Z fare.


Off topic, but can I ask what the call centre said the 'current issues' actually are? I'm sick and tired of hearing that excuse now from the VS call centre and especially Flying Club over the last several months now. Everything you mention to them and the stock answer is now always 'it's a system issue'????

Whilst VS crew and airport staff are still amazing, the VS call centre including Flying Club is utterly atrocious now

That's a good point, I will look into points plus money, thanks.

The agent I spoke to sounded so fed up (9am this morning, she's got a long day ahead of her). She said there is a "glitch" in the system that the tech team are working on. It prevented her from taking payment on my reward flights as well, so I need to call back tonight as it may be fixed then, useful!

I also asked why we can't see 2024 reward seats, she said she could see them so didn't know why we can't (useful). I pressed her but she couldn't/ wouldn't say any more.

So in answer to your question, I got absolutely nowhere and no insight into what is going on - it is just painful trying to do anything at the moment. At least I got through quickly on the Gold hotline, rather than the usual 30mins wait when I was Silver - but not much use when I couldn't do what I needed to do - pay...

The other advantage to points + money fares is that you can bring down the total fare cost to less than the tax/fees cost.
I *think* with enough points you can actually get the fare cost down to almost (if not) £0.00 as well.

I've only currently got ~63K points in my account at the minute but as an example I've just tested this doing a dummy Economy Lite booking:

mitchja wrote:The other advantage to points + money fares is that you can bring down the total fare cost to less than the tax/fees cost.
I *think* with enough points you can actually get the fare cost down to almost (if not) £0.00 as well.

I've only currently got ~63K points in my account at the minute but as an example I've just tested this doing a dummy Economy Lite booking:

Screenshot 2023-02-07 at 11.17.31.png

That's a really bad exchange rate for your hard-earned points.

Points + Money is only good when you have hundreds of thousands of points that you want/need to burn. Or you need a cash fare that earns tier points.

My preference usually is Premium Cash ticket + Upper Class reward upgrade (if there is a seat). Then you get the best of both worlds. You can even do S Premium fares to get the same points as you would for Z Upper fares. And it's more flexible.

Obviously, there is no correct way to do these things, but VS points I value at roughly 1-1.2p.

mitchja wrote:The other advantage to points + money fares is that you can bring down the total fare cost to less than the tax/fees cost.
I *think* with enough points you can actually get the fare cost down to almost (if not) £0.00 as well.

I've only currently got ~63K points in my account at the minute but as an example I've just tested this doing a dummy Economy Lite booking:

Screenshot 2023-02-07 at 11.17.31.png

That is good to know, thanks.

I just tried for our flights, and as we are looking at UC and I have c.160k points, money+points brought it down by £700ish if I did it correctly.
Quite a saving but not enough when compared to using points (although I understand that I won't get points for this reward).I am also not taking into account the value of the points, after the day at work I'm having, my brain can't cope with that.
I'll definitely bear in mind for future flights, thanks for sharing