Would you class Virgin Atlantic as expensive?

I’m a Virgin Atlantic fanboy, and I always try and fly with them where I can, which I suppose explains why I am on this site.

However, I must admit that their pricing structure often leaves me a bit perplexed.

Although I tend to book early and get a competitive price, I often see anomalies, such as:

• Premium, which is cheaper than economy
• Upper class, which is cheaper than premium
• Insane prices for economy tickets such as £2.5k for a round trip Manchester to New York
• Huge price differences one day apart, e.g. UC £2.7k round trip coming home on a Friday, or £5k to fly back on Saturday
• All tickets can be 25-50% more expensive than competitors on the same route as such British Airways

My final observation is not necessarily related to pricing: there are zero reward seats for months on certain routes (e.g., LHR to Cape Town), and when reward seats are released, they are only for economy class.

As I said, I tend to book early so the above doesn’t affect me too much, but I’d love to know the madness behind the pricing.

Premium, which is cheaper than economy
- supply/demand of each cabin and economy filling up cheaper fare codes, resulting in somewhat flexible economy ticket pricing. Same with BA.

Upper class, which is cheaper than premium
- supply/demand of each cabin and economy filling up cheaper fare codes, resulting in somewhat flexible premium ticket pricing. Same with BA.

Insane prices for economy tickets such as £2.5k for a round trip Manchester to New York
- seems odd. Make sure you have a Saturday night stay at your US destination. Fares that don’t have a Sat night are ££££. Same with BA.

Huge price differences one day apart, e.g. UC £2.7k round trip coming home on a Friday, or £5k to fly back on Saturday
- Make sure you have a Saturday night stay at your US destination. Fares that don’t have a Sat night are ££££. If not that, likely cabin filling up.

All tickets can be 25-50% more expensive than competitors on the same route as such British Airways
- I’ve not personally found this, but I only ever compare exLON fares or exEU rather than MAN or the BA feeder ports. If you don’t have status with BA, you’d also pay for seat selection, even in Club World, so factor that into budgeting for UC.

I too am a bit of a fanboy (sat in the Clubhouse while typing too, for maximum effect).

Agree with mikethe3rd's analysis here. A lot of this is standard airline pricing economics.

Another thing to bear in mind is that BA operate 380's on some routes. In fact JNB is one of BA's most profitable routes for the 380 despite the large amount of time it spends on the ground there. This also serves to skew the seat economics further. Routes that have a large amount of seats are going to be harder to compare between airlines when airline A has a significant disadvantage of total available seats vs airline B.

On the whole, I think VS's issues right now are with service rather than pricing. Most of my trips in the last year have been priced similarly on VS and BA.

Thanks for the comments.

The supply/demand side makes sense.

Regarding Saturday fares, are you saying these command a premium and so it's best to just stay in a hotel that night? Are there any other days to avoid?

A lot of the cheaper fares to the US require a Saturday night in their fare rules. Other fare rules come into play and can out trump the Saturday night rule, eg, travelling within 14 days etc. There’s a lot at play but supply/demand is the usual suspect…

The Saturday night rule does make a huge difference though.

Try it for yourself. Search LHR - JFK outbound on a Monday and Inbound on a Friday. Then do the same outbound on a Saturday and inbound on a Friday and compare.

Read more about the reasoning here.

The Saturday night stay requirement is to stop "business people" getting a cheap price for their "week long"ip, it's been like this for a very long time.
If you can be flexible it can work to your benefit, several years ago I had to attend a conference in New Orleans and I was able to persuade my boss it was cheaper to fly my wife and I out on Saturday and return the following Friday rather than me travel on Sunday to Friday. Saved the company a few hundred quid and we had a nice little break, the conference wasn't too demanding...