In August I was excited to report that Delta awards could be booked online via Virgin Atlantic’s website (see: Wow, Book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online!). Unfortunately, the ability to do so quickly disappeared. Thankfully, the feature is back. My bet is that they had been working on the feature for a while and had accidentally released it too early in August. Hopefully it’s back now for good.
Virgin Atlantic can be a great option for booking Delta awards. In many cases nonstop award prices are lower than Delta’s own award prices, there often are no fuel surcharges, and Virgin Atlantic charges only $50 for award changes or cancellations prior to 24 hours before departure.
Plus, Virgin Atlantic miles are much easier to collect than Delta miles. Points can be transferred to Virgin Atlantic from any popular transferable points program: Amex Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, or SPG. Additionally, both Amex and Citi frequently offer transfer bonuses to Virgin Atlantic. As I write this, Amex is offering a 30% bonus. You can always find up to date transfer bonus info here: Current point transfer bonuses, or within any of our pages detailing transfer opportunities:
Two big problems with online bookings
Virgin Atlantic includes huge surcharges when booking awards on their own flights, but usually does not do so for partner flights. For example, as you can see at the top of this post, they’ll charge only $5.60 in fees for a business class Delta flight from Detroit to Paris. Unfortunately, a big exception I’m finding right now is with flights booked to or from London Heathrow. By routing to London rather than Paris, Virgin Atlantic wants to charge $501.60 in fees!
I suspect this is a bug with the online booking tool rather than a new policy, but I’ll let you know once I find out for certain. Virgin Atlantic apparently charges these ridiculous fees for all flights to/from London regardless of whether you book online or by calling so there doesn’t appear to be a workaround.
Another big issue with online booking is that many airports aren’t included. There is a known issue in which typing the name or code for an airport doesn’t return results, but that issue has an easy workaround: click the little map pin icon to search by country or alphabetically.
Unfortunately, even this approach doesn’t make all airports available. For example, I couldn’t find Incheon International Airport in South Korea (ICN) or Munich Airport in Germany (MUC). US airports seem to be much better represented.
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[…] How to find awards: Search for available space at VirginAtlantic.com. See: Book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online! (again). […]
[…] How to find awards: Search for available space at VirginAtlantic.com. See: Book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online! (again). […]
[…] How to find awards: Search for available space at VirginAtlantic.com. See: Book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online! (again). […]
[…] How to find awards: Search for available space at VirginAtlantic.com. See: Book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online! (again). […]
[…] these same city pairs via Virgin Atlantic (those that show up via the Virgin Atlantic site — see this post for how to force the website to work for you, but accept the disappointment that some airports still don’t show up and you’ll have […]
[…] convenient and easy to use Virgin Atlantic miles to book Delta awards (apart from the fact that the Virgin website is super kooky). What’s more, there isn’t really a clear rhyme or reason as to when Virgin Atlantic […]
This is really wonky. I was able to see the Flights and points, kept messing around with dates. Now, Va won’t even let select the pay with points options at all.
Yep, its very buggy. When you lose the ability to pay with points, you can get it back by changing the airports to those serviced directly by Virgin Atlantic (ex: JFK and LHR). Select the miles option and do the search. Then change the search on the next screen to what you really want.
Can’t pull up SPAIN (Madrid or Barcelona) by clicking on the map. Any suggestions, as I want to see about using Virgin Atlantic miles to book Delta’s flight from JFK to Madrid?
You can look for availability on Air France’s website and then call Virgin to book
[…] when they become more valuable due to transfer partners becoming more valuable. For example, when Virgin Atlantic added the ability to book many Delta awards online (and especially when they make more saver level award space available than Delta itself), Virgin […]
[…] can book Delta flights with Virgin Atlantic. And good luck to […]
Would anyone transfer points speculatively at this point for future awards on Delta? Say, for December 2019??
I would only do so if your plans are flexible enough to work around the likelihood that Delta won’t have award space on the exact dates/times that you want.
[…] Rewards to Virgin Atlantic that we posted about earlier and the return of the ability to search and book Delta with Virgin Atlantic miles online that Greg re-discovered today, we’ve been taking a closer look at Virgin Atlantic redemption […]
Wow. I’m seeing 35k miles one way in what’s described as “Upper Class and Delta One/Business” from HNL-TYO plus $5.60. Much cheaper than using Alaska miles or BA avios.
Nice! I didn’t know Delta flew that route. That will have lie flat seats and direct aisle access.
Yes. I have not been able to find availability. For comparison, Delta is charging 155,000 miles.
About the LET bug or non-bug: when you go for a return trip from nyc to cdg, the cost is 60,000+$84, whereas to LHR it is 30,000+$500ish. So is there a bus in that it is not charging the full points value which is causing the fees to be so high?
*LHR bug
Great, thanks! That worked.
just checked the flight I’m interested in and see Virgin wants 30 k points plus cash while Delta wants 10 k points plus same amount of cash. 3 times more. That doesn’t seem like a good deal.
It depends heavily on the route as to whether or not you’ll get a good deal. I should have stressed more in the post that the best deals are for nonstop flights. Virgin seems to add the costs of each individual leg.
I’m screwed I guess since I don’t live in a hub, all international flights are segmented for me. I’ll keep my Virgin points for the IHG membership. Thanks for the reply.
Does anyone else have an issue where the “pay with miles” option gets grayed out after selecting airports? I’m selecting ATL to CDG and that option keeps getting grayed out, even though I know Delta flies that route.
Yep. Try this:
1. Search ATL-LHR. Select Pay with Miles.
2. Once the search results come up, click “refine search” and change to ATL-CDG
Awesome Greg. I was looking for this option and it works by doing refine search.
Regarding selecting a route you can only select online a destination that is served by virgin
It does seem to highly prefer destinations served by Virgin, but there are many available that are not served by Virgin. It may be that it only shows airports where Virgin has there own flights or codeshares.
Greg, I just think the Virgin site is very erratic and “flighty.” Yesterday, when I tried CVG (Cincinnati) to CDG (Paris) I was told that there were no Virgin or partner flights flying the route. Not true. CVG is NOT served by Virgin, but there is a Delta nonstop. I was busy and gave up. This evening, CVG showed up as a departure city, but I had to use your map pin icon trick (Yay! Thank you!) to get CDG to show up as the destination. Finishing the booking got weird, but I finally confirmed 2 in business for 100K, mostly transferred in from Amex at +30% to top up my meager Virgin points balance. Yay!
According to Lucky the fees for going to the UK is not a glitch and was a change implemented by Virgin. Calling in will get you the same 500+ fee as well going to the UK on Delta
Thanks. Updated.
[…] UPDATE 10/11/17: The feature is working again! See this post for details. […]
[…] UPDATE 10/11/17: The feature is working again! See this post for details. […]