Dumping fees when booking Delta One with Virgin points

For many years, if you wanted to fly Delta One business class to Europe, your best bet was to use Virgin Atlantic points. It used to cost 50,000 points plus $5.60 for that one-way flight. Then in July 2024, Virgin changed their Delta pricing. Point prices are still pretty good (especially from the east coast), but award fees are now typically over $1,000! In the past year, you could avoid the worst of those insane surcharges by flying one-way from Europe to the US rather than the other way around. Now, even that option is dead. We’re now seeing fees of over 1,000 Euros for that direction of travel!

Luckily, I’ve stumbled across a few ways to fly Delta One across the Atlantic with Virgin points and without those eye-popping surcharges. That said, Delta releases very little business-class award space to their partners. I used Seats.Aero to find some flights that were available for this analysis, but don’t expect to find these awards for the dates you really want to go. Instead, you’ll likely have better luck using your Virgin Atlantic points to fly Virgin Atlantic itself, Delta economy, or other partner airlines.

Here are three suggestions for booking Delta One with lower surcharges…

Book round trip from Europe

When booking one-way from Europe, surcharges are sky high, but when booking round-trip, it’s not nearly as bad. In this example, I searched multi-city in order to fly Delta One from Amsterdam to Detroit then later from Detroit to Dublin. The total fees for this round-trip come to 452 Euros (about $490). That’s less than half the fees of booking a single flight one-way!

Book with this multi-city trick

Since the round-trip from Europe trick worked, I decided to play with broader definitions of “round trip” to see what would happen. I found that I could lower the surcharges by using Virgin Atlantic’s multi-city search to start with a flight that originates outside of the U.S. and then add on the one-way business-class flight from the US to Europe that I really wanted. It’s important to understand that you will have to fly that first leg in order to fly the flight you really want. As a result, I doubt this trick will be useful to many people, but it was fun (in a very nerdy way) finding it!

Here’s an example:

• Multi-City Routing:
  • April 23: Luxembourg to Amsterdam flying KLM business class
  • June 16: Detroit to Dublin flying Delta One business class
  • Total cost: 65,500 points plus 174 Euros

Here’s another:

• Multi-City Routing:
  • April 19: Cancun to Miami flying Aeromexico business class
  • May 12: Detroit to Amsterdam flying Delta One business class
  • Total cost: 63,000 points plus $405

In further tests with this approach, I found the following:

• Starting the first leg in the US does not work. For example, starting with LAX to MEX or JFK to YYZ doesn’t lower the surcharges.
• Starting from Canada appears to work to lower surcharges (e.g. Toronto to JFK on Delta followed by Detroit to Amsterdam on Delta), but the process often errors out so I don’t have high hopes that it’s actually bookable.
• I was only able to get the above examples to show up by finding a first leg in business class or regional first class. When the first leg was in economy, Virgin Atlantic wouldn’t show me the second flight in business class.

Book with Air France/KLM Flying Blue miles

If a Delta flight is available to book with Virgin miles, it should also be bookable with Air France/KLM Flying Blue miles. Flying Blue often charges more in miles, but much less in fees. For example, Delta One business class from Detroit to Amsterdam costs 78,000 Flying Blue miles plus $33.

Award search tools often don’t do a good job of being able to find Flying Blue’s partner awards like the one shown above. And Flying Blue itself won’t show partner flight prices on their award calendar. So, the best way to find Delta flights bookable with Flying Blue miles is to use an award search tool to find Delta flights bookable with Virgin points and then search for those exact dates on Air France or KLM’s website.

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