Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Virgin Atlantic can be a very useful reward program, both because of the “promiscuity” of its transfer partners, and also because of the partner awards that you’re able to book through it (like when the whole Frequent Miler team used Virgin points to fly ANA Suites last year during the Party of 5 challenge).
Yesterday, Virgin took an axe to the value of one of those partners, raising is award prices between 20%-60%, depending on length of flight and cabin class.
What Happened
Virgin Atlantic’s Delta award pricing is a little cattywampus, because there are three different charts that govern it:
- US-UK
- US-Europe (but not UK)
- Everywhere else
On the plus side, Virgin hasn’t changed its Delta award chart between the US and Europe or the UK. On the down side, it’s gutted the rest, which affects pricing for domestic US awards. Here’s what the “everywhere else” Delta chart looks like for flights departing before 1/1/24:
You’ll note that the pricing for in economy looks pretty good, especially when relating to non-flash-sale Delta. The premium cabin pricing is fine, but most of the value is on the other end. Or used to be. Here’s what it will look like for flights starting 1/1/24:
As you can see, economy flights, outside of the 0-500 mile puddlejumpers, have skyrocketed. Everything above 1,000 miles is up at least 40% topping out at the 4,000-5,000 mile flights which are up a whopping 60%. Very short and long premium cabin flights are unchanged, but everything between 500-3,000 miles (almost the entire US) increased between 33%-50%.
Quick Thoughts
My sense is that Delta redemptions via Virgin were not something that was heavily used by US travelers. That said, no one likes to see a devaluation of useful award space…and this one is a doozy.
About ten years ago, Delta bought a 49% stake in Virgin. Over the last few years, Delta has moved much more towards a (low) fixed value for its own points, leading to the “SkyPennies” moniker. Given their ownership percentage, it makes me wonder if there was some pressure on Virgin to move away from an award chart that gave outsized value when compared to Delta’s own pricing. The sky hasn’t fallen and there’s still plenty of good uses for Virgin miles, but using them for domestic Delta awards is no longer one of them.
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[…] Virgin Atlantic hikes prices for Delta awards as much as 60% by FM. […]
Virgin is garbage right now. This devaluation, plus their site is full of fake award availability. After you transfer your points and try to finalize the booking you’ll get a message saying the seat is not available. I now have 75K points being held hostage by them and can’t find a real award seat to get to BUE even though their site shows multiple flights on multiple days. I’ve tried them all and get the same “seat no longer available” message when trying to finalize the booking.
I’m going with “SkyInches.”
Or “SkyPesos.”
For my uses, this brings Virgin into rough parity with Delta.
A more generalized challenge is that all airlines have been becoming less generous with partner access to premium cabins. While Virgin remains a useful currency, it is becoming less so.
I am US based and used VS heavily for domestic Y. So this is a bummer.
I was one, being based in a delta hub, that used them fairly frequently for domestic us one way awards of 800-2000 miles one-way. And I’m bummed! Time go look into the other skyteam partners. Guess I’m glad this happened when we were low on Virgin Atlantic points and before we used the amex transfer bonus to move some over.
Same here. SEA-HND was a sweet spot at 27.5K miles + minimal taxes, but not so much at 44K miles.