Collecting points every day, from everything you do is the dream.
Using them, less so.
For most travelers using points is an exercise involving at least a few internet searches, a phone call, transfer to another department and then one great big sigh of no luck.
You shouldn’t need dissertation level knowledge to use your points, and a handy tool has expanded to make that easier than ever. Here’s how to find exactly what you want using your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Points with just one click, or a couple simple ones.
Reward Flight Finder
When you cash in your points for a flight, it’s called a Reward Flight. When it comes to finding availability on British Airways or Virgin Atlantic, there’s now at least a couple destinations which should be your very first search: SeatSpy, point.me or Reward Flight Finder.
This handy (free) website allows you to search once and see every date a seat is available for the entire calendar year. If you want to go to LA, it’ll tell you every date you could possibly do that using miles in your preferred cabin.
How Finding Seats Works
Your choices are pretty simple for this example: Virgin, or BA? Once you’ve selected the airline whose miles you plan to use, you can enter your starting point and destination and voila – an entire year of dates when there are seats available in your desired cabin will pop up in a friendly visual calendar. It’s that easy.
If you have fixed dates and are open to destinations, for £3 per month (cancel anytime) you can see what’s available on your date only. That’s cool, but the real reason to spend £3 per month is the hourly alerts, letting you know if new seats open up.
It’s important to note this excellent tool only works on Virgin routes, and does not for finding seats on flights by partners like ANA, but booked via Virgin miles.
For example: if you want to go to New York on February 25th in business class using Virgin Points you can set an alert for that and other dates and never have to search again. Seat Spy or Reward Flight Finder will automatically search for you every hour, and send you an email if a new seat is released. It’s the best way to get in on hard to get destinations and seats.
Once You Find Your Perfect Seats
Once you’ve found your perfect seats, you’ll head back to VirginAtlantic.com and plug in those dates to get booking directly with the airline.
The big benefit here is that you’re able to save tons of time searching and can also set free alerts rather than have to search time and time again, in case your perfect flights aren’t immediately available.
Award flight availability often works like a reverse bell curve. Basically, it’s great when flights are first released around 345 days in advance, then terrible or non existent for a while, and then great again as the flight dates approaches and seats need to be filled. Letting a tool do the searching for you is awesome.
This sounded too good to be true – my two points airlines all in one place! Unfortunately, it was – the Virgin Atlantic search is currently broken and they are trying to restore the link.
Looks like there is no intention to restore the Virgin functionality in this website. What a shame!
Here is an alternative site that does provide Virgin (and BA) reward seat availability – seatspy.com