Virgin points are often the cheapest option for booking Air France or KLM flights. For example, for a trip to Paris I’m planning, I found a great Air France business class award that was available. If I booked through Air France Flying Blue, I’d have to pay 303,000 miles plus $225 per passenger. No thanks! Meanwhile, Virgin Atlantic showed the same flight for 48,500 points plus $281 per passenger. Much better! Exciting right?
The problem comes in after you click through to book the flight… after you enter each passenger’s information… after you enter your credit card details. When you click to actually finalize the booking, the system thinks for a little while then decides “no soup for you!” with a message that says “Sorry, there are no longer seats available on your chosen flight. Please try another search.” The same thing happens via a desktop browser, the cell phone app, and the mobile website. Believe me, I know. I learned this over and over and over.
I know from experience, that some call center reps can push through these bookings and some can’t. The conventional wisdom here is to keep calling until you get a rep that can do it. The problem with that approach is that phone waits can be very, very long. Ask me how I know. Fortunately, there’s an easy work around. Chat.
Problem: Air France & KLM awards can’t be successfully booked online through Virgin Atlantic’s website or app
Here’s a quick summary of the problem: Via Virgin Atlantic’s website or app, you find Air France or KLM awards available and you try to book them. After the final checkout screen, a message pops up saying that something went wrong. Then after a few seconds that’s replaced with “Sorry, there are no longer seats available on your chosen flight. Please try another search. #100503A”
That error message makes it sound like the award space had been gobbled up in the time it took you to book the flight, but if you search again you’ll see that the award space is still there.
Solution: “Need Help? Chat to us”
Virgin Atlantic offers an online chat function. You might not see it on their home page, but if you click through on a desktop browser from their home page to “My booking… Manage booking” (or browse directly to: virginatlantic.com/my-trips/search) you should see a red box in the bottom right corner that says “Need Help? Chat to us.” Click that. If you have any trouble with it not popping up after clicking, try another browser instance.
Now that the chat window is open, your next goal is to get past the automated system to a person who can help.
Here’s a quick path through the prompts to get to a real person:
- Please select from the following options:
Flying Club - What can I help with?
Spending Points - How would you like to use your points? Please select a category below to begin.
Our Partners - Fantastic! Were you looking for information on partner airlines or other partners?
Partner airlines - Did that answer your question?
No - I’m sorry I wasn’t able to resolve this for you at the moment. What would you like to do?
Speak with an advisor
In my case I got a real person online pretty quickly and she was able to help me book the flight without any muss or fuss at all. The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes. After I told Nick about this (he was having the same issue with a different booking), he also got his done quickly.
I can’t promise that the first rep you get will be able to help you. But if they can’t, I recommend waiting a bit and trying again and again until you find someone who can.
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Thank you for this post. I was able to book through the chat!
Interesting on the call in agents saying they cannot book. I have never been able to book AF/KLM online but never once has a phone in agent be unable to book it for me. So maybe a recent development? I tried chat today to check on whether I had still had a valid CC companion voucher and it just said all agents were busy and said to call.
This is wild if this works… I will give it a shot. I’ve been calling once a week for the past two months. I always get the same response. “There is something wrong with the availability from Air France KLM.”
I’ve mentioned how in the past I was never able to book online, yet they all keep referring to this email that they all received…
I’m just trying to book economy, NVM their business class seats.
Reddit also similar threads with the common response.
[…] Virgin points are often the cheapest option for booking Air France or KLM flights. The problem comes in after you click through to book the flight… after you enter each passenger’s information… after you enter your credit card details. When you click to actually finalize the booking, the system thinks for a little while then decides “no soup for you!” with a message that says “Sorry, there are no longer seats available on your chosen flight. Please try another search.” ➡️ Read more […]
2 AF Biz SFO-CDG next April for 175k Virgin Atlantic miles. By far the cheapest and the only one I found the entire month.
Can I ask – what was the equivalent points redemption on Flying Blue?
500k to 1 million
This article was so helpful!!! Thank you! I had moved 97,000 points to Virgin to book a AF flight and was panicking because I couldn’t book any of the KLM or AF flights!
Did it work?
After calling, the response I got from the rep was that it known issue with KLM/ AF partner flights in particular. That it shows availability on the website and in their system, but it is outdated information and cannot be booked- “phantom availability”. He said there is a lag in the system getting updated.
Has anyone else been told that? Is this just one of the reps that is unable to make the booking?
Still may have better luck trying again with another rep or chat?
I believe that’s a misinformed rep. Keep trying through chat until you get someone who can book it.
Thanks, Greg. Another data point confirming the chat booking. After two calls and receiving various excuses, on chat the booking went right through. Great save (by your post) as I was about to give up on this one
This was my experience as well. Calling go nowhere, but on the first try the chat agent booked it.
That was my experience too using chat this morning . I keep seeing availability on the website but can’t book. Chat agent said that they are not seeing availability at their end. Was looking for IAD to AMS on KLM on 11/22.
I feared something like that would happen when trying to book ITA on virgin. Then I would be stuck with tons of virgin miles and couldn’t get them out. Air France has chat as well
I would love to try this but the “chat to us” button hasn’t been working for me–for months
Did you see in the post where I suggested trying different browsers if that happens? I couldn’t get it to work with my usual browser instance but had no problem with an incognito one.
Thanks. Was able to book CDG-SFO with AF using chat when it failed multiple times on their website.
We just went through this a couple days ago. We needed to book three tickets for the same flight but out of three separate pools of points. 1st ticket, sailed through no issues. 2nd ticket, I got the “no soup for you” message but after three tries, got it to go through. 3rd ticket, no dice even after many tries. But a phone rep was able to get it done, fortunately.
Is this applicable to availability issues recently on ANA reward bookings too? Noticed lots of reports of ANA flights showing availability on United but cant be booked via Virgin. This seems to be more recent and was not an issue back in May.
You’ve always had to call on ANA
Had the same problem last month and was able to get it solved after two phone calls. First phone call: “No idea, you’re hosed!” Second phone call: “Yup, I know the problem you’re talking about, I’ll take care of it!”
Now I need an incredible flight to Japan to apprase my wife’s complaint on the fuel taxes!
I keep looking for these, but have never found availability. What cities do you have success with to/from the US?
Ive never used chat for this scenario, but I do use chat a lot. I have had very good retention bonus success by using chat.