Virgin air miles newbie

[bwfc4ife]

Morning all

I’m trying to understand the above but getting nowhere fast. I have signed up to a Virgin credit card and now have just over 100k airmiles (not all from credit card!), but I cannot figure out how to use them. I’m looking at virgins website for next year but can only go in school holidays. There doesn’t seem to be anything available whatsoever. So is there any point collecting the air miles?

Can I use them for a seat upgrade? If so, how do I do this as I can’t find it anywhere.

Any help gratefully received as I don’t want to be wasting money on this card if the points are useless to me!

Thanks

Leanne

[loves2plan]

School holidays are probably the hardest time to find reward seats. They go quickly too, so you have to be ready to book as soon as they get released, which might be 11 months in advance, and also be flexible with dates. Seat Spy is really useful for looking at reward flight availability for whole months and you can set up alerts on there for when they're released though (that does require a small subscription fee after the free trial). There are normally more from Heathrow than Manchester too. I've just checked on Seat Spy and there are return reward flights from Heathrow to MCO available in July and August next year. As they're peak flights, it's 22,500 points per leg, so 45,000 points for a return ticket, which means you could get 2 with your points balance. However, that then means buying however many additional tickets you need, so it would be worth checking if it's cheaper to do that or buy full price flights from another airline.

There is also a 'points plus money' option, so that might be worth looking at. Not 100% sure on upgrades as I've never used ours like that, but I'm sure someone will know.

Definitely have a look on Seat Spy for the availability though as there is quite a lot, but you may need to be flexible with dates.

[Bozza]

A good response above, to which I'll add...

- Availability changes ALL the time. I've been monitoring all of Orlando, Miami, LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York and Atlanta for a summer holidays 2022 trip, as we're not entirely sure what we want to do yet.

- Although booking up early is the best option (and it's too late to be early for the summer 2022 summer holidays now) rewards seats do come up late on. We've booked up PE seats there and back with miles/points only a couple of weeks in advance before, for flights entirely within the school holidays.

- Prepared to be flexible. Typically this means looking across different dates and being prepared to mix Orlando and/or Miami based on availability but you can go further than this...

Would you be prepared to fly into Atlanta (where there's often lots of availability) and drive down. It's a bit of a trek, but you could make it fun and take in some of northern Florida that you may not have seen before?

The same with New York - maybe incorporate a few days in NYC and book cheap internal flights with cash to get you to and from Orlando.

- If your party is, say, four people search for one person first and then up to two etc. It may be that you could use points to get flights for some of your party and then cash for the remainder.

- Search for one-way outbound fares first then use the price calendar to see what dates have availability and then do the same with the return leg - this will give you the best view of what is available in each direction.

Don't give up! It can sometimes feel like a bit of a challenge, but availability does change and often at the most unexpected of times!