Gold card upgrade vouchers

Should gold card members get 1 or 2 upgrade vouchers for flights each year?

Many other airlines programmes give this kind of benefit for achieving the top level.

[Pete]

Virgin don't offer this, although it has been suggested to them a few times

Pete

[fozzyo]

They do give you upgrade vouchers for the Heathrow and Gatwick express though! Not that many people bother to use them.

Should gold card members get 1 or 2 upgrade vouchers for flights each year?

To me they would be a lot more useful than the companion voucher(only used 2 of 10 issued)

Originally posted by fozzyo
They do give you upgrade vouchers for the Heathrow and Gatwick express though! Not that many people bother to use them.

Well, if anyone has any vouchers for next March.... [:w]

[fozzyo]

Locutus check out the wanted / swaps section. There are usually plenty available.

Mat xxx

FWIW, I think the milage upgrade options are pretty good on VS. You only need to notch up 60k and you can Y-J. This seems much lower than other airlines, so I do not think there is so much need for VS to give upgrade vouchers. And you only need to notch up 80k (100k on some routes)for a freebee up the front.

Interestingly on the face of it the freebee always looks much better value for money than the upgrade to me. But when you actually work out how much value it is in pence/mile, it actually works out very similar on both by my rough working (about 4p/mile - viz - Assume £500 for an econ ticket and £3000 for an UC ticket, then upgrade is worth £2500/60000miles = 4.2p and the free UC ticket is worth 3000/80000=3.75p/mile).

I think the HEX upgrade vouchers are pretty much useless - there is little difference between the grades on the train and its only a few minutes journey (not sure about GEX as I have never used it).

I am also dubious about the value of the companion on AU renewal - maybe that should be replaced with a 1 class upgrade voucher, or maybe a 10/20k bonus. At least you could get to use it.

1 class upgrade voucher, or maybe a 10/20k bonus

Agree both would be better options.The first class on GEX is nice and quite and never that full,but as I always buy a 1st ticket from Notts Derbyshire to LGW you get the GEX portion 1st class in with the price.Ebay always has the upgrade vouchers for sale.

This seems to have drifted off.

My point was that given that other airlines offer upgrade vocuhers for flights wouldn't it be reasonable for Virgin to offer them?

[Pete]

Yes, it did drift a little, didn't it?

It would, of course, be reasonable for them to offer them, but they don't (apart from the reward voucher you could get if you had enough points in a FlyingCo account). Last time I had a chance to talk to Virgin's marketing team face to face (a while back now), I did suggest this would be a much better reward for loyalty than the Companion flight or HEX/GEX vouchers, but it didn't look like they were about to change anything soon.

Pete

Originally posted by manymiles
This seems to have drifted off.

My point was that given that other airlines offer upgrade vocuhers for flights wouldn't it be reasonable for Virgin to offer them?

Sorry my most recent post had drifted OT, so I have dumped it.

However I think my original point was in reply to the topic: What I was trying to say is that the existing upgrade (and other) benefits were more generous than other airline schemes, and as such I could not see why VS should offer upgrade vouchers to golds. I don't think you can consider one benefit in isolation of all the rest. As to renewing gold, well I think that is fair game as the renewal benefits they offer are weak. Apologies if my thrust was not clear.

[RichardMannion]

Originally posted by manymiles
This seems to have drifted off.

My point was that given that other airlines offer upgrade vocuhers for flights wouldn't it be reasonable for Virgin to offer them?

It is a bit unfair to put the emphasis in that way - each loyalty program is different and will offer different benefits. I'd love VS to have the companion voucher deal that BA AmEx offers, but I'm not upset with them that they don't offer it. FC has many cool benefits that other programs don't offer. I'm a BD DC Gold member along with lots of other people and trying to use the Gold upgrade vouchers (when they were of use) was a bit hit and miss.

Its like saying, how come some airlines don't give you hot meals when some airlines do? Can you imagine going to BA and askign why most of their economy fares don't earn at least 100% mileage (as they do on Virgin and SQ, and many other airlines) - they would just laugh.

I do understand your point, but its not a fair comparison. I agree HEX and GEX vouchers are of limited use - I tend to give mine away every year to people in the office. I would much rather be given say 2 or 3 companion vouchers to allow me to take a guest into Revivals, as I can take one in at the other CLubhouse facilities.

Thanks,
Richard

Guess this just shows that you can't please all the people all the time.

We should measure the whole benefits not just one to determine whether the sum of the parts is greater. As it is, I think Virgin is the best of any airline I have ever flown with when it comes to mileage awards and the hurdles when upgrading. However I have also used AA upgrade vouchers frequently within the US (and my major bug bear was that you could never use them transtatlantic) and that has been appreciated. As it is I'm broadly very happy with Virgin's awards system and think the focus on miles is right (over and above companion tickets) because they're the things that really give you flexibility - whether for free flights or upgrades.