V-Flyer

Does anyone know if Virgin Holidays will price match an identical holiday as on British Airways website.i.e same dates, same hotel, same room, the only difference being BA flight in Club as opposed to Virgin Upper Class. And the fact that BA is a few thousand £ cheaper.

NO - has to be exactly the same as per this i.e. same airline and flights

They don't even price match their own website! (Although I did manage to get them to as online kept asking me to pay for V-room access which should be free when booking a platinum hotel)

Ok thanks for the replies
y)

Have just booked a VH at the virgin shop in bluewater and they priced matched the VH website and at the same time undercut both BA and kuoni

I genuinely would love to be able to book though VH to get the extra miles, sadly I've never found them to be remotely competitive, and not willing to price match either. I've only looked at them for Caribbean/Dubai trips, so perhaps other destinations are better priced...

The holiday i have booked is for Barbados and i just asked to price match VH website

I got a price match with them last year, but didn't take it though. We were looking at St Lucia, BA was cheaper, I called VH who took the details and emailed me to say they would price match apart from the cost of transfers.

I can honestly say I've always found VH competitive priced, I do think prices have increased dramatically though. Looking at our holiday last year and pricing the same holiday this year is a lot more expensive, more than I would be willing to pay.

I posted on the other thread about a recent experience with Kuoni and then VH.

I got a good price match with virgin over the phone. looked online found identical holiday same flights with virgin then looked on virgin online and then rang them to price match they also price matched park tickets. excellent customer service! So got my airmiles

VH price matched our holiday to Naples in Florida last year.
The BA price was coming in at around £3100.00 for the 4 of us with flights to MIA, car hire and hotel. Virgin Holidays wanted £3700 for exactly the same and asked me to email them the BA quote which I did via some screen shots.

It was then matched within a few minutes and we had a great Virgin Holiday....
Good Luck.

ken54 wrote:The holiday i have booked is for Barbados and i just asked to price match VH website

Well Barbados is certainly the place I've tried most often and they have never come within a mile of the prices I've got out of other travel agencies (although they are on exactly the same VS flights...).

Admittedly, I do spend a lot of time driving a hard bargain here, but I figure that a few hours on the phone for the sake of an extra thousand in savings is well worth it...

This is all for school holiday bookings though so YMMV... But I got 4* Antigua in PE this easter for sub 5k, when it would have been 1.5k more on VH, so my recommendation is to shop around!

Seems like it's very agent/store dependent then.

I think a lot of it is down to the mananger of the shop

i just rang the number on the VH page it took me to a store, miles away form here, but the people i spoke to in the VH store were fantastic, even explained a few things to me that i was not happy with. We upgraded the car on the documents i received it says 3 adults 2 children, but we are 5 adults, i thought it meant that was all the car was suitable for,bearing in mind we are travelling PE, so paniced thinking no room for upto 10 cases lol, but what it meant was 3 adults as in legal to drive hire cars in florida as the other 2 are classed as children as they are under 21 for driving. I dont know if in store they can price match in person but as said this was over the phone but the staff were in a store not head office.
As said maybe it depends on who you speak to but in the brochure it does say they can price match ( think there are T&C's)

I rung them up and got an emailed reply saying they couldn't match the BA price due to the vast price difference. Hence I subsequently booked BA.

For the past 3 years VH said this to me but this year VH price was below BA don't know why this is like that this year ?

Last Oct I went to Antigua with BA as VH wanted £1800 more for the identical holiday ! ?|
They could't come near the price only dropping it by £400 but the nice lady did say "and you get your milage, isnt that great", well actually not at that price. n(

It seems the price promise is very wooley v(

I have found that if you try to price match in a store you get better results than over the phone

It seems that Virgin are desperately trying to increase their revenue as opposed to turnover. They seem happy to lose pax numbers as long as they keep up the profit margins. Even when losing long term customers to the competition.

Is this to make some numbers look good for some future financial transaction?

They price matched our December holiday to Antigua, booked last April in their Lincoln shop. matched against BA with PE and private transfer on arrival and saved nearly £500, which was great until day of return flight and had 8 hour delay and sat and watched the BA flight leave on time, arrrrgh!

I agree with comments in this thread that VH is way over priced.

I thought I would use some miles to get a cheap holiday and even throwing 500K miles at a holiday, I could still get it cheaper elsewhere! I really don't understand who books holidays with them and why when you can easily find the same holiday cheaper elsewhere.

SteveA wrote:I agree with comments in this thread that VH is way over priced.

I thought I would use some miles to get a cheap holiday and even throwing 500K miles at a holiday, I could still get it cheaper elsewhere! I really don't understand who books holidays with them and why when you can easily find the same holiday cheaper elsewhere.

y) y) y)

Many years ago I was naive enough to book through VH because I didn't think there was any significant price variance for exactly the same holiday/flight, but I'm far more clued up these days. Travel agencies are highly competitive, and many have specific deals with certain major resorts. When you have 3 or more hanging on the phone, telling you that they don't want to be beaten by anyone else, you can appreciate there's a fairly big arbitrage opportunity there.

Or to put it another way, if I had used VH for my Caribbean and Dubai family jaunts over the past 10 years, I would be close to £20k worse off than I am now. Tends to sharpen your focus a bit, plus haggling can be fun sometimes!

We recently booked, and are paying an awful lot, to travel PE with Virgin Holidays to the Caribbean in August this year and have been told we can't get into the V Room lounge. So much for the so called "premium experience" and "Rock Star Service" the brochure makes such a song and dance about. I'm now starting to realise that there is no longer anything "premium" about booking with Virgin Holidays and that I could have booked the exact same holiday (flights & accom) through an independent travel agent for significantly less. Oh we'll, I'll certainly know better for next year.

Have VH told you why you can't go in V-lounge

ken54 wrote:Have VH told you why you can't go in V-lounge

Fully booked. They have offered me the club lounge but at £50 a head I don't think so, given we won't be drinking alcohol etc so early in the morning. They also told me to try the Servisair lounge which I think is the same price as Virgin's VRoom.