V-Flyer

Received this from VS trade this morning:

Starts at the end of January.

We’re making more connections to Australia



We have some exciting news. We have a new codeshare agreement with Virgin Australia, creating more fantastic travel options between the UK and Australia. From the end of January, your customers will have the opportunity to experience all the destinations they want to travel to; more seamlessly, just on our airlines, in one booking and with the ease of a single check in and bag drop.

Your customers can book and fly daily from London Heathrow to Melbourne, via Hong Kong or Los Angeles, then connect onto a Virgin Australia flight straight to Melbourne. And as part of the codeshare, there are connections from LA to Sydney and Brisbane too.

There will be up to three daily flights between London Heathrow and Los Angeles with a daily flight to Hong Kong, creating the most flexible travel options to Australia than ever before.

Does this mean that I can spend my Virgin FC airmiles on a trip to Australia?

Hmm probably not! I think Delta is the only codeshare partner that you can buddy up VS rewards flights along with partner rewards, but I might be wrong.
These codeshare aren’t showing any availability yet as far as I can see.

VS Flying Club miles can indeed be spent on VA reward flights details here

Right, but you can’t generally have a VS Reward and a partner reward on the same ticket can you? Which is what would be required if one wanted to travel UK to Aus using Miles, no?

Such a shame that the HKG clubhouse is gone. Would have made perfect sense to have a Clubhouse at the LAX and HKG stop-over points. It was always baffling that VS and VA never made codesharing a priority...

29hrs via LAX, can't see anyone wanting to take this over alternatives, imagine price would be uncompetitive too given the longer distance.

Looks like 24hrs 15mins via HKG. The 8 hour layover in LAX looks like the killer...

Having just landed from a HKG to LHR flight i can report that there were 141 passengers on board and about 36 of those were in UC. as there were about 160+ on our way out the HKG route looks shaky surely.? Maybe introducing the opportunity to carry onto Oz will make a difference.

First time in HKG lounge as a VS customer, OK selection of F&B but nothing that would stick in my mind.

We had just flown in from Singapore with Singapore Airlines having been upgraded to Business Class from PE - now that trip WILL stick in our minds!

I've not been able to do a dummy booking yet to MEL via HKG on a VS/VA mix... was this definitely confirmed as being a codeshare? I can get a connection at LAX to appear easily enough.

I can see it on Google Flights but requires you to call VS to make the booking.

Three hours on the layover seems pretty reasonable on the outbound.

Ah - thanks Ryan! Perhaps it hasn't been fully loaded yet.

The VA codeshare agreement is being extended to now also include a flight to SYD from HKG and a couple of domestic routes within Australia from July:

We've added a new daily connection to Sydney through Hong Kong in addition to Melbourne

There's new domestic Australia connections that have been added to the codeshare – Adelaide to both Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra to Melbourne.