Flydrive / Website rant. Grrrr

Trying to pull the trigger on a booking but the venerable website won't let me!

Eyeing up a west coast excursion. Indeed the VS website even includes a recommended schedule of picking up a car in San Francisco and dropping it off at LAX. Great!

So I click on the Fly-Drive option but it only allows single destination, not multi-centre. What's nice about the fly-drive is I only have to lay down a deposit of £175pp.

Of course I could go ahead and book a straight multi-centre flight but they then want all the money up front (main reason I don't want to do this is my adult son still isn't sure if he's coming and I want to take advantage of sale prices, I can take a £175 deposit loss).

So I guess my question is, save going into a VH shop, is there any way to book a multi-centre fly-drive on the website?

Tx

I think all Multi-centre bookings have to done either by phone or at a shop.

I email my local VH shop with an outline of my holiday plans. They then come back by email with options/dates/costs. I then confirm and have one short phone call to make the initial low deposit payment.

After that everything can be handled online. Almost all of the online convenience with the backup of a named person in the shop who will handle any queries or make changes for me.

We did exactly that a couple of years ago.
LHR-SFO
2 nights Fishermans Wharf
2 Nights Napa
2 Nights Yosemite
1 Night Death Valley
3 Nights Las Vegas
4 Nights Los Angeles
LAX-LHR
(car seperately through QEEQ and Alamo)
Matched the price of BA
Went into a Virgin Holidays Shop, gave them my itinary etc and from then on everything was done by phone.
Thankfully or not depending how you look at it our plane went tech just before taking off at LHR so arrived into SFO 4.5 hours late but received £2200 comp.

Thanks for the replies. I ended up going into a VH shop and booked it. For some reason they managed to get me a better car deal than what I was quoted online.

Also they checked my wife's dormant Flying Club account and found £80 worth of Tesco vouchers, I thought they'd expired around Covid time but apparently there's no expiry date on them.

So better car and £80 off, a bit of a result.

We did exactly that a couple of years ago.
LHR-SFO
2 nights Fishermans Wharf
2 Nights Napa
2 Nights Yosemite
1 Night Death Valley
3 Nights Las Vegas
4 Nights Los Angeles
LAX-LHR

My current provisional plan is
3 days San Francisco
9 days LA (Disneyland, Universal, Six Flags)
3 days Las Vegas

Thankfully or not depending how you look at it our plane went tech just before taking off at LHR so arrived into SFO 4.5 hours late but received £2200 comp.

I hope not this time! Had 3 years of bad luck with BA.

Great itinerary!

I’m doing an even split in September:

4 nights LA (1 day at Six Flags , not bothered about Disney or Universal as Universal will be 2026 for Epic)
4 nights Las Vegas
4 nights San Fran.

Already planned day trip for Grand Canyon.

So excited. Been to Las Vegas in 2022 for first time (was supposed to go to Miami but was planned to storm all weekend). So didn’t have much money to gamble with, played with 100$ on my last night and won 2219$! That paid for by next UC reward flights !

Did a similar trip to Plane340 in September,

If you have not been before, and you can fit it in,I would definitely recommend at least a couple of days in Yosemite.
We stayed in Oakhurst, amazing drive into the valley and village, also easy access to the Giant Sequoias.
Just be aware that you need an extra entrance pass at weekends in the summer, buy on line only costs $2, we saw a lot of people being turned away.
Have a great trip.

Neil

Did a similar trip to Plane340 in September,

If you have not been before, and you can fit it in,I would definitely recommend at least a couple of days in Yosemite.
We stayed in Oakhurst, amazing drive into the valley and village, also easy access to the Giant Sequoias.
Just be aware that you need an extra entrance pass at weekends in the summer, buy on line only costs $2, we saw a lot of people being turned away.
Have a great trip.

Neil

Thanks but I'll have 3 kids in tow (19, 17, 13) and accommodation can be difficult. I do however have that penciled in for a future trip with just me and the mrs (do the whole Napa thing while we're at it).

Hi Fuzzy

If you're planning on driving the Pacific Coast Highway, I'd recommend keeping an eye out for closures due to land/mud/rock slides. https://roads.dot.ca.gov/?roadnumber=1.

After the Grand California Road Trip of 2016 https://v-flyer.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=293366&p=923097#p923097 where we drove from LA up to Monterey we planned to revisit in 2017 but heading south from SFO to LA, however PCH1 was closed for some 18 months following Pfieffer Canyon Bridge collapsing and mud-slides further down. Our drive in 2017 ended up SFO > Monterey (2 nights) > Paso Robles (2 nights) > Santa Barbara > BUR.

We did manage the north to south drive in full in 2019, driving SFO > Monterey (2 nights) > Ventura > San Diego.

If you do stop at Monterey I'd really recommend a whale watching boat trip. In 2016 we went with Fast Raft - this is in a RIB rather than a more traditional boat and was exhilarating being so close to the water (humpback blow stinks we were that close ) but was uncomfortable and if the weather is bad you are completely exposed to the elements. In 2019 we went with Blue Ocean Whale Watch which was in a traditional boat and were very good. Both Fast Raft and Blue Ocean Whale Watch operate from Moss Landing Harbor, just north of Monterey.