great time to spend miles only flights for upper class to HK

hey guys great forum you got here, just joined first post

I fly now and again nearly always with virgin to collect the airmiles,

normally in PE for about £1100 - £1300 sometimes with airmiles
a few times on UC for about £1700 - £2200 with airmiles

london - HK, london -san fran, london - dubai

I mostly use my airmiles to drop the price down slightly
but now i noticed virgin has a spend miles only option before you had to log in and try to guess what dates where available to spend your miles only flights as you all know no doubt but i never had any luck with it until virgin put in there new system in place

in december and january for london hong kong there are loads of upper class miles only flights available right now

if you got like 60,000 miles in your account like me, you would need to buy 60,000 more miles for £1000 + £600 for the taxes and stuff
so £1600 for UC ticket for me

how good the deal is depends on how many miles you need to buy but for this seems like a steal considering current

economy tickets are about £1300 - £1800,
PE £2000 - £2500,
UC £5500

I'm guessing we all got some saved up miles here right

ok sorry this post just got very long and nerdy

but i hope to post my first trip report with loads of pictures when i get back after the new year

mike

Since they dropped SYD route the availability in all classes using miles on LHR-HKG has increased significantly. This is great if you want to redeem but does cast a long term cloud over the route unless they can improve revenue seats.
There are a lot of seats on that route with CX and BA already so they really need to work on the corporate clients. I feel they had relied too much on through traffic and have been caught off guard since dropping SYD.

The upside is that now is a great time to get reward seats (actually the best way is to buy an upgradable ticket and use less miles - then you also earn miles plus use the miles booster and you probably end up with an amazing deal).

that's right they did cancel the Hong Kong - Sydney route you just reminded me,

I remember reading about that at the time and did not think much of it at all except, maybe "oh that does not affect me" but maybe that was a little short sighted of me, they loose a whole bunch of people going to and from Australia
I visit family back in HK I really hope that route is not going to be cut any time soon

I reserved my seat numbers for the flights in upper class, and looking at the seat maps about half the seats were empty, I still got over 20 days till my flights but not a good sign I suppose

you make a really good point about buying upgradable tickets using miles, I checked the prices for the qualifying tickets and it does make sense

Do you know if it is easy to upgrade doing this when you ring up or are the upgrades really limited in number ?
I know it says subject to availability but I was wondering how difficult it is since there's no way for you to check availability online

I checked the spend miles options for the london - HK route again and they actually added even more seats to buy using only miles in UC so again maybe not a good sigh of things to come

anyway thanks for the advice about the upgradeable tickets using miles tip

mike