Virgin miles one to one

Hello, this is my first post.
I was trying to find an email address or chat room where I could discuss my virgin miles and the best way of spending them.
We are looking at travelling to Orlando from LGW on the 9th April next year <2 adults and one 2 year old) I have nearly 70k in miles and hope to save a few more but wondered what is the best way of spending them, companion flights, miles plus money or reward flights?

Many thanks

Dave ?|

[honey lamb]

Hi Dave and welcome to V-Flyer

i think you'll find that this forum is as good as any email address or chat room when it comes to spending miles. Just hang in there and someone with more information than me will come along and give you some pointers

Thanks Honey Lamb. Fingers crossed! y)

Daveyp1471

Hi and welcome!

It will help us to help you if you could give us an idea of what it is you hope to achieve -- the cheapest overall journey for all 3 of you? The cheapest way of flying in a premium class? What is your total budget, roughly? Are your dates flexible?

Cheapest overall really and an efficient way of spending my points. I'd love to go PE but think economy is more to budget. We need to on the 9th April. I was budgeting for £1000 - £1200.

Thanks

[honey lamb]

If you want to book anything using miles the first thing you need to do is to ensure that there are reward seats available on that date. The best way to do that is to do a dummy booking for the dates you hope to travel using the Spend Miles option. You need to be logged in to your Flying Club account to do that. After that. After that you cab think about the options as to whether to go for M+M fares or a straight forward reward or a companion fare

Cheapest overall really and an efficient way of spending my points. I'd love to go PE but think economy is more to budget. We need to on the 9th April. I was budgeting for £1000 - £1200

That's pretty tough!

OK, I've done some research. The cheapest I was able to come up with was about £1370, for 2 miles+money tickets in economy and one economy reward seat. I couldn't beat that. That would cost 49k miles. If you made the reward seat a PE reward (assuming you have enough miles), then one of you could have a much more pleasant flight for a small extra cash cost -- but you probably wouldn't want to be separated!

If you had a way of earning another 20k miles, it would be possible to get the cost down a bit more.

Maybe someone else can do better -- I may have missed something obvious... and I cannot guarantee that my research is accurate...

Thank you so much. I'm hoping to save a few more points. I'd love PE but don't think the wife would approve.

Don't know what the costs are like but you can at least treat yourself and wife with a one-way PE reward from your 70k miles and pay for a one-way economy using the combifare.

I'm guessing for 2 with the above combinations is in the region of £1200-1400.

Assuming you are coming back 2 weeks later, the current cheapest economy fare for the three of you is around £1797 (including £977 taxes, charges etc). The 9th is a week after the main easter two weeks, but demand can still be high around the week before and week after, so I don't think any future sale fare would cover your dates (but who knows).

Firstly, using miles for economy redemptions is not usually the best value, as you still have to pay the taxes etc and the difference between that and a revenue fare can be quite small. However, if your first priority is to save cash and you would otherwise not use your miles, you can bring that figure above down to £1394 by getting 1 outright economy reward and 2 miles plus money ones (that would need 51000 of your miles). So around a £400 saving, although many people would value 51k miles much higher than £400.

1 outright and 2 M&M tickets as economy out, premium economy back would cost £1629 and use 67K miles - still a saving of £150 on the revenue fare but with a more comfortable return on the overnight flight.

In all cases remember that the revenue fare adds to your miles pot, whereas the M&M/redemptions don't.


Before you go out of your way to collect more miles, I'd be clear about what you want to get from them. Getting to 90K miles would enable you to get 2 outright rewards, which would reduce that £1394 by £298 to around £1100 - but you stand the risk of there not being any availability left while you are collecting. To upgrade a revenue economy fare to PE (or UC) means buying one of the more expensive fare classes, although It doesn't look as though using miles for premium travel is high on your agenda for the time being.

PS - are all the miles in your account or are they split? You can't just pool the total, but you can get individual legs for others from your account, and vice versa