Anyone used virgin miles to pay for upper class flights??

[User1478901]

We’ve got loads of air miles for virgin Atlantic and planning to go to Asia (very flexible on when but needs to be school holidays)
It seems to vary between costing 100k-135k miles plus £500ish pounds for upper class tickets.
I’m finding the website hard to navigate. You can only search on specific dates so can’t see when best offers are. Also you can’t combine prem economy and upper class flights.
Ideally we’d fly out prem economy and fly home upper class.
Has anyone got any tips?

You are going to have to be very flexible both with the destination and dates. Specific dates of travel are standard with such programmes and can be in high demand as soon as these dates are released, these are released daily and you may have to wait two weeks to see the rest of that month. You may also find that the school holiday dates are not actually offered at all or if they are just one or two dates for both departure and return.

Such upgrade programmes do tend to be very inflexible when it comes to dates. They usually only offer lower demand dates for both outgoing and return departures (so no departure and return dates around weekends for instance) and routings.

What do you mean by upper class? This isn’t a term used on flights. There’s first class and business class, first class being the most expensive.

Kirsten Upper Class is what Virgin Atlantic calls it’s business class. Maybe lay off the snarky comments if you don’t understand what you are talking about.

Thanks Atilla they seem to have a lot of prem economy flights in August but only a few upper class. I checked some week days and they do have more UC flights on those days. Think I’ll need to ring them as the website doesn’t let you search flexibly for dates.

I would call them. To use our points on premium economy it took about 5 phone calls and multiple searches before they could find what we needed. A faff but got there in the end

We ended up ringing and just saying where can we go around these dates?!!

User

I would give them a call and be prepared to be flexible re dates particularly if you want to sit in Upper class.

Generally speaking their upper class seats tend to become more available during weekdays and also on routes that are not always frequented as often by a lot of business travellers. It may well be that you will be able to travel out on say Tuesday and return on Wednesday a couple of weeks later.

Upper class flights made me

Just call them. They make it impossible to navigate the website. Book way in advance, be flexible, think about more unusual destinations eg Paris on a Friday is going to be tricky, Helsinki on a Wednesday is way more likely.

Thanks all! I’ll call them next week. Unfortunately Virgin only fly to a few destinations so we are a bit limited where we can go.

Definitely call them it’s much easier. We’ve usually purchased economy / premium and then upgraded with miles

Give customer service a call, as others have said. They’re very helpful and can search for seats easily on your behalf (unlike on the website which is next to useless), but do check which seat they’re booking you into. The seats near the bar at the back aren’t great. You also don’t get the chauffeur service on the reward tickets, just so you know Good luck!

Agree with all others who have said to call. When we called, there were several flights that were not visible online that we could book onto. Customer services were really helpful. You will need to be pretty flexible on dates or book really far in advance to get the seats though.

The lack of destinations is why we blew all our remaining miles on a trip in upper class - we were never going to get through them otherwise and wanted to cancel our credit cards

I'm with Virgin flying club and use my miles for PE or Upper. I always ring them as I find it easier than trying to navigate their booking system. I do miles plus taxes or pay for a standard flight and use miles for an upgrade. Get them to look at both options for you

I booked Dec last year for flights in July and got the exact dates I wanted

I have- twice I booked 333 days in advance in he day of release to get the dates- there are only 2 miles flights available in UC in advance, rest become available nearer time, you have to be super flex I dates otherwise.
It's worth noting you can also use your miles for codeshare airlines and to convert to virgin holiday vouchers so that might give you a more flex option ie pay £3k for a holiday and then use miles vouchers towards it, iirc its £1k cap

Also - some routes much much business than others eg HK flights nearly always full but India less so,