Up until recently, Virgin Atlantic didn’t have a guarantee of reward seats like British Airways does. But they did announce a new feature for Gold members recently which essentially guarantees reward availability in a similar fashion to BA. We covered it in more detail here.
Virgin reward seats can appear at any time from when the flight goes online roughly 330 days before the day of travel, and the day of travel itself. In fact, I have even had reward seats AFTER check-in has closed in some circumstances. Proof that it always pays to keep the lounge staff on your side!
It’s widely rumoured that Virgin does not add the reward seats automatically, but rather via a manual back office process. That means there also are no set times in the day where the seats can appear.
Tips
If you’re looking for Virgin Atlantic reward seats, you should check the website on a regular basis and book the seats as soon as you see them.
- If you need more than one seat, but the amount you need are not available, book as many as you can and keep watching for more. Waiting for them all to appear is extremely risky because there’s no guarantee of more appearing and someone else could take the existing seats at anytime.
- If you need multiple seats in a cabin, and there’s none or limited numbers available, book the next cabin down because you can always upgrade again later by simply paying the difference in miles & taxes.
- Remember that you can still book reward seats on the day of travel, at the airport, subject to availability.
- You can hold reward seats for up to 72 hours by calling Virgin. This is useful if you want to transfer points from a credit card, or buy miles for the transaction.
- Be flexible!
- Be persistent!
Bottom line
Even if you are not a Flying Club Gold member, after the recent announcement we did notice a big increase in general reward availability. Unfortunately, it’s less “clockwork” than British Airways, due to Virgin being a smaller airline. So it requires more legwork to find these seats, however, it can be done.
We really enjoy finding reward availability, so feel free to get in touch with us.
