Virgin Holidays and miles

Can anyone confirm the redemption rate for miles against a Virgin Holidays booking? An agent tells me it's £50 off per 10k miles, no cap. Is that correct?

Makes it significantly worse than £16.50 off per 3,000 miles direct with VS if redeeming a lot of miles (I am).

[mitchja]

The rate the agent mentioned was the old miles voucher rate which no longer applies.

It's now the same rate as if you put miles towards a direct flight with VS i.e. the £16.50 per 3000 miles you mentioned.

I've just run though a dummy booking online with V Hols as an example:

Total cost = £2498.19

I have 57,000 miles available to spend (it works in block of 3000 miles). Using all my 57,000 miles (19 blocks of 3000 miles) brings the cost down to £2184.69 saving me £313.50.

£313.50/19 = £16.50 per block of 3000 miles.

As far as I can see there is no limit to how many miles you can spend?

Thanks mitchja, that's exactly what I had thought too, that the rates had been unified.

I didn't realise I could part pay with miles direct on the VHols website. Is that reasonably new? Or maybe I haven't been able to use it because it only offers to sign into Flying Club via your email address. My account has refused to do that until recently due to having a very old account that expired that was registered at the same email address that I use for my current one.

Indeed it shows £16.50 off per 3,000, same as VS and apparently no limit (well, nothing I can hit anyway with circa 900k miles).

The best part of all this? 2 of the last 3 Upper seats (I need 2!) have seemingly been sold while trying to figure this crap out and trying to decide whether to book a package with VHols vs booking flights direct with VS for a better redemption rate. Which has turned out to be a total waste of time since I was right and the agent wrong all along.

[mitchja]

I *think* V Hols added this last year as I noticed the pay using miles slider when I booked car hire for Palm Springs in Feb with them last year.

It can be a little confusing as you need to log-in using your VS Flying Club account details and also enter your name in the correct fields before the link to your FC account actually works.

At the same time your Flying Club status is checked and if applicable, the Red/Silver or Gold discount will be applied (but only if no other discounts have already been applied).

matt.hibb with a mile balance that high I'm surprised you are not necker island bound given it's not much more miles.

Shame about the flights - we had a similar "load" related issue - which tends to happen a lot on the smaller cabin VS routes - where all the UC was sold and we couldn't get on for last summer (well for acceptable money - I don't call a 6k pp fare acceptable). Ended up flying BA - which was awful compared to VS, but better than being in W on either airline.

Can anyone confirm something for me?

There's no reward flights available at present for our dates, so I'm thinking of using our miles to reduce the price of our holiday to Disneyworld in November.

Do I have to use my miles at the time of booking? Or can I just pay the deposit for now and use the miles later before the full balance is due? And if my flights become available can I upgrade my cabin instead?

Many Thanks

[mitchja]

According to the spend section of this page you can do it either way:

How to spend

To spend Flying Club miles:
Please visit http://www.virginholidays.co.uk to make a booking and start spending your miles today!

For those who already have a Virgin Holidays booking, please log in to your ‘Manage My Booking’ account on http://www.virginholidays.co.uk and select ‘Flying Club miles’ within the Payments page.

Yes you can upgrade the cabin using miles for V Hols packages but it’s a bit of a faff as you have to have paid V Hols your final total balance then ring V Hols and ask them to manually ticket your VS flights (if your tickets have not already been issued which isn’t until about 3 weeks before you travel) and then finally ring VS and get them to then process the miles upgrade in the normal way.