V-Flyer

I tried to login to my flying club account on Sunday and could not, by Monday it said:

"We’re currently experiencing technical issues with some of our systems, and are aware our Flying Club website is currently unavailable. Our teams are working hard to rectify the issue, so we can get the site back up as soon as possible. We apologise to our members for any inconvenience caused."

It just seems odd that this has been down for multiple days.

I think it has been down for ~5 days now. Virgin's legendary IT team or something more sinister? I know hacking attacks, etc, are on the increase and I wonder if they have fallen victim to something like this.

Yes agreed! I'm actually in IT and run a team of developers, I can't imagine what would make it be down for so long. I had wondered if lot's of people are transferring their miles out, but then they could just suspend that feature.

On a side note a friend of mine had booked with Air France and needed to move their ticket due to cancellation over COVID-19, however they were just able to login to their booking and reprice it online and change the ticket. I can't get my head round why VS don't have this, I have had to call many times over the year's to change tickets and the whole thing has crippled their call centres. For a flight I was meant to be on in July with VS that was just cancelled I completed a re-booking form but it seems to be nothing more than a contact type form so I assume someone has to manually review them all. Seems a bit nuts!

Jonathan

At a guess - the majority of the legendary VS IT team has been furloughed with the few who remain concentrating on keeping the most essential systems going. And right now FC will be deemed fairly non-essential.

And I'll have another guess - VS are preventing miles being spent and in doing so carefully limiting their liability in the expectation of a near future buyout or pre-pack administration.

The Andrioid App has been upgraded, as it is now offering a biometric login facility, not that it's working right now.

Could be related.

v1rotatev2 wrote:And I'll have another guess - VS are preventing miles being spent and in doing so carefully limiting their liability in the expectation of a near future buyout or pre-pack administration.

In which case you’d surely just disable the “spend miles” function? Feels like a systems failure to me rather than something more sinister.

I haven’t seen any reports of people being unable to book with miles via the call centres.

The Flying Club log-on screen has been ropey for many many months now often requiring multiple attempts to log in giving error 21 messages.

Also after chasing missing miles>IHG points here after waiting over 30 days now, Flying Club staff also cannot access anything either it seems.

I asked Virgin about this, via their text message service. I got a reply in about 48 hours. It said, "I am really sorry to tell you that our loyalty database is currently unavailable due to technical issues".

As others have suggested, I am suspicious. I think they are avoiding giving any money back to customers and basically freezing everyone out.

Speaking to friends — some of whom spend significant amounts with VA — Virgin is haemorrhaging goodwill in their response to COVID.

Get a nonsense message that my email address is linked to more than one account.

I'm also getting slightly suspicious about this - have been trying to convert some miles into a Virgin Wines voucher for a while now and keep getting told by text service they can't access the loyalty scheme either - hate to say it but I think Virgin are trying to stop people spending their miles

The Points Guy got a response from VS Press office who advised the issue should be fixed sometime next week.

https://thepointsguy.com/news/virgin-at ... club-down/

flyingfox wrote:The Points Guy got a response from VS Press office who advised the issue should be fixed sometime next week.

https://thepointsguy.com/news/virgin-at ... club-down/

Thanks for the link.

At the current time, whilst most of us are cooped up, it is easy to respond to speculations

Fingers crossed it has not been a major hacking attack that prompted the closure

buns

gumshoe wrote:At a guess - the majority of the legendary VS IT team has been furloughed with the few who remain concentrating on keeping the most essential systems going. And right now FC will be deemed fairly non-essential.

This is my guess. New month next week - they can bring people back in to fix it. Remember FC isn't part of VAA which if anything would file for pre-pack, the miles are owned by VLG (50/50 VS DL from memory)

I’m stuck in a VS loop. Have two reward seats and 1 paid seat on hold, however they are only held until 1st June, but they did say we can extend the hold if system not gack up and running.
So what’s app Ed them last night to say re the two bookings on hold can you make sure the hold is extended. Got the standard 14. Days before you fly response. Not much use if I can’t pay for the flights and lose them

Shops Away login is also disabled

Shops Away login is also disabled

Thats interesting given that A.) I just got a few 'approved miles' emails from them other day and B.) I thought it owned/run by a different company?...

I hope this is just an IT problem.

Reported elsewhere that American Express Membership Rewards is no longer offering Virgin Flying Club as a transfer partner. VS say it is not linked to the IT issue.

https://www.americanexpress.com/en-gb/r ... cttype=All

flyingfox wrote:Reported elsewhere that American Express Membership Rewards is no longer offering Virgin Flying Club as a transfer partner. VS say it is not linked to the IT issue.

https://www.americanexpress.com/en-gb/r ... cttype=All

As AmEx is very integrated with Flying Club as they can offer almost instant transfers now I suspect it actually is related to the VS IT issues.

Maybe VS have put a lot of staff in IT on furlough and now this has broken, they are taking a lot longer to get things up and running again as a result.

What ever the reason, it’s a very poor show as it’s been down now for well over a week so far and doesn’t improve VS’s current already damaged image one bit unfortunately.

There’s not even been an email from Flying Club about this. How hard is it to send an email out to all FC members?

The almost total lack of communication from VS throughout all of the COVID-19 shutdown has been shocking IMHO.

mitchja wrote:What ever the reason, it’s a very poor show as it’s been down now for well over a week so far and doesn’t improve VS’s current already damaged image one bit unfortunately.

There’s not even been an email from Flying Club about this. How hard is it to send an email out to all FC members?

The almost total lack of communication from VS throughout all of the COVID-19 shutdown has been shocking IMHO.

Can’t disagree with any of that.

But my hunch is that virtually everyone deemed non-essential to operations has been furloughed and right now there simply isn’t anyone available to fix the problem.

The longer it goes on the more suspicious it looks though. They need to sort it soon or the conspiracy theories will really run wild.

FWIW, as of a few moments ago, the VS web site offers the FC login page and allows you to try to log in, but all attempts fail. For many days they've disabled the login page utterly, so perhaps they're at work on the login problem now, but haven't managed to fix it just yet...

-Brad

I think it depends on what device you use.

On a desktop I still can’t get beyond the “technical issues” message but on an iPhone it lets me enter my FC number and password, only to return an error message.

So I don’t think anything’s changed.

Perhaps it depends on browser type rather than desktop vs. mobile site. At the time of my prior post and now, I'm given the FC login page in my Safari browser on a MacBook Pro (i.e., not the mobile version of the site).

-Brad