Virgin Holidays

Hi all

looking for a bit of advise please.

as a gold member i have a companion flight and also about 170k of air miles available.

i was looking at booking a virgin holiday and wanted to take the best advantage of the above plus the additional 10% off Virgin holidays.


in the ideal world I'd like to purchase a upper class flight, get the companion and then use air miles for the 3rd flights I'd need but also wrap this up into the package deal I'd get with Virgin holidays for accommodation etc..

anyone got any suggestions or experience of doing this kind of thing before ?

sorry if its the wrong forum but i couldn't see any other place to post.

thanks in advance
Mark

I thought you could only use airmiles to buy VH vouchers, I think it's 20,000 miles for £100 which is terrible use of miles. Because of your status you will get the standard 10% off the price of the holiday but this is without any online discount so sometimes it works out cheaper just to buy online and not bother with the FC discount.

If anyone else has any info on this then I would love to hear it. In my experience there's little value in the FC when buying a VH.

Don't think that their is anyway to combine mile spending with Virgin holidays, except exchanging miles for a virgin holidays voucher which isn't the greatest use of miles.

The companion voucher doesn't really have much value due to the fact that you have to buy a full fare ticket in order to use it, usually cheaper to buy 2 discounted fares than it is to buy one full fare and use the voucher ( you still need to pay tax and fuel surcharge on the "free" ticket )

Maybe your best bet is to book accommodation seperatley and then look into booking some M class economy tickets and using your miles to upgrade to UC subject to availability.

Usually 40-50 thousand miles per person return to upgrade. Depending on where you want to go

It may be better to book direct for the flights with VS and then the hotel itself, or even find the package with someone else.

Having just done this, I did get a price match via virgin holidays which shaved a whack off their published and discounted rate.

Would you mind saying where you are going and when, it may help?

[mitchja]

Your only option would be to book your accommodation only with VH, they do offer this option.

You cannot combine reward/companion flights with VH bookings as a package and you cannot use miles to upgrade VS flights booked via VH.

You would have to book them all separately.

thanks both for the feedback, sort of what I thought as well. last time I ended up getting two flights using miles and then paying for the 3rd flight (it worked out the cheapest way and got me my tier points as well). i didn't use Virgin holidays it was a RT1 form SFO down to LAX with a bit of time in San Diego - just wanted to try and get more benefit if it was possible.

I often just end up using the miles for upgrades (when available) and not using the companion deal as mentioned it just isn't economical to do so.

sorry, missed the other two comments.

not sure where i am going, i quite like "looking at just deciding" Antigua looked quite nice

James - thanks for the tip on accommodation only, i wasn't aware you could do that, i will see what that looks like on cost.