Do Virgin hoard reward seats?

I am booked to travel to Lagos in December on a Reward Upper Class Return. I have just called Virgin Flying Club about changing the booking date to January. My requested outbound date of January 8th is showing as available as a reward seat on the Virgin website yet when I called them up they said there was no availability till January 22nd and that the website was probably not uptodate.

Anyway I went back to the Virgin website and it does allow me to choose January 8th as a new reward Upper Class booking. It takes me right up to the Credit Card payment page. Obviously I am not going to purchase another flight when I already have one booked but I am willing to bet a ton of money that if I did enter my credit card details the system would accept it and make the booking. So what gives? Are Virgin being purposely deceptive and if so why??

Has anyone had a similar experience?

[Neil]

I know there has been a few issues with the website showing rewards that weren't there, and not sure if that was resolved or not, so that could be what is happening here.

What I would do is call UC reservations again, speak to someone different, and see if they give the same answer/info. I have had a similar thing happen before, where one agent has said no, called back a few mins later and another agent has sorted it without any problem.

Neil

I think VA's booking process and customer service is frankly pathetic. I called them up 4 times and spoke to 4 different people and got the same response....that January 8th wasn't available for a Reward Upper Class seat.

After getting off the phone I have just gone back to their website and booked a new Upper Class reward flight to Lagos for, guess what, January 8th [:0] , coming back January 31st. So now all I need to do is to pay 25 and change my original booking from December to July next year (which is when my next journey will be). So the only inconvenient aspect is that I have ended up booking my next flight 8 months early which is a problem as my proposed dates of travel in July may need to change.

Either the virgin website is more uptodate than their internal booking systems or VA encourage their Customer Service staff to lie!!!! Which is it?????? Forget bad onboard food, forget faulty entertainment systems, forget grumpy cabin crew, this type of customer service cheeses me off more than any of the above!!!!!

[Scrooge]

I have actually had more issues with the website than the staff when it comes to getting reward seats.

Guess what, it gets worse, even though I have now booked a new reward flight for January 8th, the website is still showing that date as available. So not only did they have availability, they had lots of it. Geez!!!!

I had exactly the same problem a couple of months ago, I started a thread about it then.
I wanted to book a 'G' to Las Vegas that had been showing on the website for a couple of weeks using an 'L' fare and upgrading with miles. The two agents that I spoke to on the phone both informed me that there were no flights available and that the website had several 'issues'.

What annoyed me even more was that it still was there a week later, so like you I tried a dummy booking and it took me all the way through to the payment page. I then rang VS back to protest (as I had believed them and booked LHR-LAX in the mean time) only to be told that it was still an error on the system[V].

-Steve

Why not call up, speak to one of the people who gave you wrong info and quote your new booking reference to prove a point and then insist they re-credit all of the miles used on your december trip?


quote:Originally posted by mpase
I think VA's booking process and customer service is frankly pathetic. I called them up 4 times and spoke to 4 different people and got the same response....that January 8th wasn't available for a Reward Upper Class seat.

After getting off the phone I have just gone back to their website and booked a new Upper Class reward flight to Lagos for, guess what, January 8th [:0] , coming back January 31st. So now all I need to do is to pay 25 and change my original booking from December to July next year (which is when my next journey will be). So the only inconvenient aspect is that I have ended up booking my next flight 8 months early which is a problem as my proposed dates of travel in July may need to change.

Either the virgin website is more uptodate than their internal booking systems or VA encourage their Customer Service staff to lie!!!! Which is it?????? Forget bad onboard food, forget faulty entertainment systems, forget grumpy cabin crew, this type of customer service cheeses me off more than any of the above!!!!!

quote:Originally posted by barnstaple
Why not call up, speak to one of the people who gave you wrong info and quote your new booking reference to prove a point and then insist they re-credit all of the miles used on your december trip?




Very good suggestion.